For whatever reason, I've never approached cycling with a plan. It's the opposite of my days as a runner, when training meant having lots of structure. And ya know what? It made me a better athlete. I started out racing this spring but changed my focus. I decided to work on the basics: bike handling, speed, and stamina.
It started off with a professional level bike fit. Local cycling legend Paul Swift and a posse of his trainees tweaked my position. A little adjustment here, a little more there, and it felt like an entirely new bike. Then I got a whole new component group: cranks, shifters, brakes, etc. With my refurbished ride, I started to put in some miles, including the annual DarWin ride: my sixth in a row.
I wouldn't miss it for anything. Check out this picture:
DarWin is a serious slog: two and a half hours of flat fast riding, three and a half hours of climbing, an hour of downhill. I didn't have much of a base going into DarWin this year. I'd also ridden pretty hard earlier in the week so my legs were already pretty tired.
Those three and a half hours of climbing were awful, which is fine. Learning to suffer again was on the "to do" list. It just seemed that it would never end, and my quads were on the verge of total fatigue the entire time. I've always been a strong climber, but this year's DarWin was the hardest thing I've ever done.
Rainy Pass, the highest point of the ride, eventually appeared. With the suffering completed, I moved on to the next phase: countersteering. Usually, riders steer by pointing the front wheel where they want the bike to go. Ironically, leaning into a turn and pointing the front wheel (
slightly!) in the opposite direction makes for faster turning.
I've managed to make sense of the physics involved, but I'd never put them into practice until DarWin. Gliding down that mountain road, I put the pieces into place: lean the bike (not the body), put all the weight on the outside foot, hug the top tube with the inside knee, push (
slightly!) on the inside handlebar. And it worked. It's counterintuitive. It's subtle. It's smooth.
At first it didn't seem real so I let go of the handlebar with my outside hand. The countersteer was working all right! After a few switchbacks, though, the voice in my head pointed out that 45 mph (75 km/h) on a mountain road is probably not the ideal place to learn new handling skills.
Since then, I've been working on speed and power every week. The long rides have gotten a bit longer over the past few weeks. It's put me in a much better position physically and mentally than at the beginning of the season. Strangely enough, I'm just not that excited about racing. Maybe it's because the other stuff is coming along so well.
That countersteering thing, however, is still a work in progress. Except that I'm practicing in an empty parking lot. It seems safer than the mountains, ya know?
WIDGETIZE