Off the Reservation

Forgive me father for I have sinned:

I may have deviated just a little from Dave Scott’s recommended workouts.

Let’s just clear the air and announce that Dave did not prescribe the century ride to me.

That was my own stupid decision.

First we’ll go over some back history (because there is always back history).

When I first joined up for CDA, I blindly jumped in. I had never done a Marathon, never done anything near 100 miles. Basically I was a stupid as stupid comes.

Realizing my idiocy, I looked around for was to fix my condone.

I stumbled on to the local Las Vegas Cycle group. They had just started a new challenge. “Century of the month club”. The rules…pretty simple, ride a century each month.

Well, that sounded perfectly up my alley. Never mind the fact that I was nowhere near prepared for a century. I went ahead a signed up and let the peer pressure build.

Never mind the fact that I had done all this without consulting my new coach. I had alluded to it but never came right and boldly asked about the idea of a century each month.

In fact he pretty much directly denied me to ride distances longer than 65 miles.

Ehhh! What does he know right?! I mean, it’s only a hundred miles. I can slip it in and he’ll never even know the difference right?

Wrong! Apparently, it actually does make an impact on the body to ride for 8 hours over hills and more hills.

While mentally I felt good. My body needed some time to recover. The next day I took off, but my body still wasn’t up for all anything and felt that it should let me know.

My Tuesday run S-U-C-K-E-D! It was supposed to be a Tempo run but midway through the warm-up, I knew it wasn’t going to go according to plan. My legs felt like I was slogging through mud and my perceived effort was through the roof! Only problem was my STOOPID heart. It barely even moved. I could have been sleeping for all my HR monitor told me!

But wait…there’s more!

I had thought that one day was enough; surely by now my body was done having a hissy fit. It was time to get back to working out in style. Again, I was wrong!

Next workout was a HR based workout where I had to bounce my HR between two different levels. One easy and the hard.

Nope! Heart rate wouldn’t even get close to the easy zone. And the only way I could get even close was to throw the body into high gear and crank the effort up to 10. Clearly, this wasn’t going to work for me. I finished the workout with a modified easy/easier workout and the body was very happy.

Luckily the body seems to have forgiven me since then. My third workout seemed to be back to normal. Mind you it still sucked, but that was more because it was a hard workout and I suck and less due to the fact that I was overtrained.

So what did I learn? Well first I am going to go all out there and say that I am not sorry I did it. It was a good way for my body to learn the mileage. It was also good to know what it ‘feels’ like to have my body overworked.

I learned that coaches KNOW what they are talking about. That they don’t just arbitrarily assign workouts.

Maybe there’s a purpose behind these workouts!! HUH! Groundbreaking stuff I know.

So while I can’t promise not to deviate now and then, I think it was good for me to truly appreciate the training that is prescribed to me.