Progress: It's not Just a Campaign Promise

The weird thing about progress in athletics is that if you work hard it actually finds you. The even weirder thing is that a good coach has a way of sneaking up and showing you how much you've progressed.

Adam was being his typical sneaky self this week and threw a pair of tough workouts at me early in the week. It came as a rather unpleasant surprise to me because I had grown used to the idea that the road season was coming to an end and that it was time to transition back to 5-hour endurance rides. You know the rides where you remind your friends that you only have to go fast to outrun the dog that chases you. Even in that situation you only have to beat one person in your group (sorry Joe, you were young and full of promise, but we had to leave you behind).

On Monday I go to check the calendar and there suddenly appears a set of intervals, darn it, a set of I-have-to-go-hard intervals. [For Kelly Longergan's sake, an interval is that point in time in a cycling workout where you have to ride hard for a while.] Normally these intervals were short in duration and few in number. This time, they weren't, they were triple the number and double the time that I had recalled. Despite that fact I still housed them and it didn't kill me.

Today it got worse. Today was the day when you have to suck it up and know that by doing this workout you are making yourself a stronger rider. I realized about half way through the workout that I had done it before. In fact I had done this exact workout about 2 months prior. At that time I failed miserably. I didn't complete one of the three sets. Today was a different story. I'm not going to say that it was easy or that there was never a time that I couldn't hold my pace, but I did the workout. I had improved by more than 150% and this was on legs that were worn from the day previous. This was evidence of that elusive goal of progress.

Today may be a sad day, however, because I fear my beaver might have departed this world. Of course by beaver I am referring to:

yes, the small woodland creature that populates rivers like the Potomac. Training routes are slowly created over time as you learn new roads and new areas. There are different routes of course: 1) long let's get lost on the back roads routes; 2) shorter let's get focused and ride a workout routes; 3) specialized routes for specific workouts; and 4) I hate the idea of riding today let's find a route that goes from my house to a coffee shop and back.

Today I was on my training route for doing a workout which required no stop lights and was close to the office so that I could get back easily once my legs cracked. It uses a road that follows the Potomac as it snakes it's way from suburbia into DC. It's a great road that most cars don't know about and as a result I love. Along this road a beaver normally sits and watches me ride by (I typically do loops on this road). I've seen this beaver maybe 6 times in a row now. I'm starting to think he/she was my first real groupee. However, today the beaver wasn't there and I am of course unnecessarily concerned.

It's strange what things you come to expect along the road. Adam and Ben once believed that there was no such thing as a living armadillo.


We had passed millions of armadillos on our rides but they were always the victims of road kill; likewise, with opossums (playing dead in the middle of the road is not a good defense mechanism by the way). We spend so much time out there and a great deal of it is by ourselves. I just find it funny to think of what we end up spending our time thinking about. This is the randomness that goes through my head. I hope my beaver is just busy building his dam.