One of the Masses
According to the calendar and Puxatony Phil, winter's not over yet, and there's still ample time for a nasty stretch of cold and snow. (As an aside, if that cold streak does make an appearance you'll most certainly hear someone talk about the myth of Global Warming dreamed up by Al Gore, so it disappoints me when those same people don't say anything about the weather we've seen this winter as being evidence that just might support a sign that things aren't right....) But even if winter does make a brief return, I've lost one of my few competitive advantages heading into the spring racing season.
As someone who author's a blog called "Trainer Confessions", it should come as no surprise that I have no problems suffering endlessly during the winter months perched upon the trainer. If the monotony proves to great for me, I'll just throw in a dash of time on the rollers. So if needed, I can hunker down without hesitation and log hours and hours of training for weeks or months if needed without ever venturing outside.
My unscientific polling data tells me that not everyone else is wired (or mis-wired) like me and the potential of such mind-numbing stints of riding in a cave easily justify extra days (or weeks) off the bike in the winter. They keep their sanity, but at the same time they've allowed me to scratch out just a little bit of an edge (or at least allowed me to close the gap).
In a year when winter seemingly ended on Halloween, I'm guessing that the need to ride indoors has dropped dramatically for many racers. Consequently, the excuses that justified extended time off the bike have been reduced, and subsequently, my competitive advantage has dissipated. I haven't opted for an indoor ride more than twice on any given week this winter, and I haven't been forced to churn out an interval on the trainer since the first week of December. If I'm not suffering indoors, that probably means I'm just one of the masses out taking advantage of the snow-free 2012 winter roads.
Disconnected
So while I'm concerned about the overall Climate, and I'm resigned to the fact that I'm not getting nearly the leg-up on the race competition I probably needed, the weird weather has offered me a somewhat surreal training experience on a regular basis. In prior winters, most of my long interval work (intervals 8 to 10 minutes in duration, repeated anywhere from 4 to 7 times) was done indoors, where I was distracted by the computer or the TV. If work was flexible (which was true way too often in my 2010 and 2011 racing seasons), I could crank out the intervals during an extended lunch-time break, where the passing scenery offered up a form of mental distraction.
But with work now keeping me busy during normal business hours, the daylight long-interval sessions no longer is an option. And while cranking them out on the trainer early in the AM is still a possibility, it seems as though the TV and the computer never sufficiently distracted me from eventually watching the seconds slowly tick by on the clock. The suffering truly gets butal once you slip into a mode of looking at the clock every so often, hoping that 5 minutes had just gone by, but realizing that it had only be 15 seconds since the last check.
So what's been new for me with the warm winter weather is that I've been logging nearly all of these longish intervals before the sun even hints that its about to make an appearance. And I have to say that in a somewhat twisted sort of way, I've actually developed a slight bit of enjoyment from this form of suffering while under the cover of darkness.
As I hunker down and enter into interval mode (BTW, these particular intervals I've been doing are at a very low -- 50 to 55 rpm -- cadence), I switch the iPhone on and start pumping in heavy metal tunes from the 90s into my earplugs (NIN, Marylin Manson, GnR, etc), and I no longer hear any noises from the outside world. You might say this is a tad bit dangerous as I can't hear oncoming traffic, but in the dark the headlights often give me all I need to stay safe and alert.
Also, because these efforts require me to sustain a constant effort and cadence throughout the full 10 minutes, I try to get myself into a comfortable position before the effort starts. As a result, my I tend to lower my gaze when I do these longer intervals. My headlight is mounted on my helmet, so with the lowered head position, the next 100 feet of road ahead of me becomes brightly lit. But because I'm riding on roads that mostly have no street lights, everything outside of the road immediately ahead of me fades away to nothingness.
While the roads tend to be quiet at the odd hours I ride, those few cars that I do encounter once I'm in interval mode almost don't even mentally register as land-bound vehicles. They enter my consciousness simply as flashes of lights approaching and then passing by at a very safe passing distance. I can't hear them (due to the music) and I don't pick up on any features that would distinguish it as a car (as my focus is on the brightly shining road right ahead of me).
It's almost as if they are space ships from some science fiction movie or video game, especially when I'm on a stretch of rolling hills. Once a car overtakes me, the flash of light seemingly "flies" away up ahead of me. I don't see the actual hills in front of me, so all I see in the corners of my peripheral vision are lights that are ascending upwards until they disappear, no different than a rocket launching off into the stratosphere.
Before you know it, the ten minutes are up. My body is suffering (especially if it was the 7th such effort!), but my mind is unburdened as I never felt the pressure of the slowly ticking clock. Instead, my brain was lost in space, disconnected from reality. It might not be as fun as a drug induced disconnection from reality, but it still makes for a pretty surreal trip!
