Slow-Twitch Sunday
I just did two hours on the fluid trainer and boy are my cheeks tired . . .
And sore! And my neck is stiff, you know? Grumble grumble.
Today’s workout is my longest of the season in any discipline and my longest in almost two years, fwiw. Boy do I have to get real tri shorts, though. I pedaled in my standard-issue jammers and they chafe. “Your swim suits do not make comfortable bike shorts, Mr. Nike!” “Man, what?”
Nine workouts of record this week, but three were supershort. Two were one end of a brick; the last was little more than play – me stealing 15 minutes of pool time with the kids to practice breathing on my left. No, it still doesn’t really work.
Race day is three weeks away! Next weekend I’m aiming for another two-hour endurance ride to cement my bike fitness and my first six-mile run in a month. My goal is to do two laps around the Westminster bike course next Saturday. The following weekend I will back way off. I need to work in bike-run bricks of some length each of the next two weeks two. I did a ten-minute run after Coach Angela’s spin class from hell Wednesday night, in the dark on grass in an unfamiliar field. I have lined up my excuses like this because I need every one of them.
As clever readers pointed out, there is in fact a Swim-Bike-Stop multisport event and it’s called “Aquabike.”
There were many developments in pro cycling since last Sunday, the upshot of which is that, if you believe Greg Lemond, Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, they are the only professional cyclists of the last twenty years who have not doped. I’m not even really exaggerating. A shame the three of them can’t form a club, what with hating each others’ guts and all. (An exaggeration: Floyd and Lance have had at least a surface rapprochement.) As it stands now, were they to take some of Floyd and Lance’s recent titles away, they’d have to go halfway back in the peloton to find someone to give it to, and it would just be someone they haven’t gotten around to testing yet or slipped everyone’s notice.
One reason stripping titles would make (more of) a farce of the sport is that, because the confessed/adjudicated/linked list is pretty indistinguishable from the cycling hall of fame in your head, they’d be handing the prizes to competitors who, in important ways, weren’t even in the same race as the folks they replaced. A race is a tactical enterprise in any sport. Racers make decisions on how to approach this next part based on where they stand in relation to competitors and what ambitions they can plausibly realize. If they ever bust Lance, they’ll be settling yellow jackets on some people who, by the penultimate stage, weren’t even trying to win, because they had no chance. They were aiming for tenth place, or a personal record or whatever backup ambition was left to them. They were making decisions on how hard to go or when to back off not based on what would win, but what would be respectable enough to get their contract renewed.
That’s the pass the sport has come to, it seems to me.
Meanwhile, Trust But Verify continues to comprehensively blog the aftermath of the Landis hearing. I don’t know if Floyd doped. What I’d really love is for Thoreau to put aside whatever personal ambitions he has for his own life and read through the scientific material that came out in the hearings and render an opinion on whether the French lab work was sound science. It doesn’t look like it to me. It looks, in fact, like professional cycling decided that, like that other war on drugs, the campaign against doping requires and justifies cruel inversions of anything we think of as justice and the rights of the accused. Among other things, the prosecution spent considerable effort trying to taint Landis as a bad guy – with Landis’ eager help in the Lemond Affair – in a way that certainly seems to fit the ordinary-language meaning of “prejudicial.”
Comment by Brian C.B. —
May 28, 2007 @ 8:39 am
Until my second child was born, when I was 40, I used to be quite the serious cyclist. I grew up admiring Eddie Merckx, whose career wound down just as I got involved with the sport. I bought a PX10, then the last great steel bike Trek ever made, then a Cannondale swaged-tube aluminum climber’s bike. I ran, lifted weights, moutain biked in the winter, and my career suffered from all the time I spent at it and I didn’t care. I moved to Colorado, then Virginia, to find good cycling. I was never good enough to race, particularly in the USA, where criterium racing is nine-tenths of it all, and particularly as I grew older and the skill categories got lumped together.
It’s still a beautiful sport. It’s still a wonderful thing to work truly smooth paceline, something that doesn’t happen often without coaching, surprisingly. It’s still wonderful to launch yourself up a breakaway climb, look back from the top of the hill, and see other, strong people, pay for the sprinter’s physique you don’t have.
Having written this, the Tour and the rest deserve to die. And, God knows, Floyd’s ordeal and the past decade of arrests and revelations should kill it. I don’t give a damn whether Lance doped. I give a damn that the Tour got so outsized that a racer could train only for that one race (thanks, Greg). Professionally, it’s poisoned. Let’s just look back on the really old times, before riders had pharmaceuticals available.
Also, Henley, from your last photo, I saw knee socks. These do not exist in either running or cycling, unless your plan is to cause your competitors to slow themselves laughing.
Comment by bos —
May 28, 2007 @ 10:15 am
Knee socks can be explained away as part of the trend for compression socks (as modelled by Paula Radcliffe). Or possibly as part of an attempt at improving aero-dynamics without shaving legs or going Cervelo.
I read Paul Kimmage’s book on cycling some time ago. Hard to believe there are clean winners.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 28, 2007 @ 10:52 am
Heh. I do have shorter socks, and I’ll definitely wear them come race day.
Interesting stuff on cycling guys. Thanks.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
May 28, 2007 @ 11:50 am
However, if you want to be really, really stylish, Jim, I do think I still have a couple of wool jerseys. Now, wearing one of those would put you on the cutting edge. They probably come with their own trail of moths, by now.
Comment by barrisj —
May 28, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
A little late to the thread, but I see where Bjarne Riis copped to doping (EPO) in the ‘96 TdF, and some Cherman physio git now claims he shot up Jan Ullrich in the 90’s (in an unidentified race in France), Eric Zabel came clean…woah, Team Telekom was totally dirty! Now, let’s have some of the USPS domestiques other than Andreu ‘fess up…come on, chaps, it’s good for the soul!
So, who will the two limey tits calling the TdF for OLN/Versus anoint as their favourite Yank in the ‘07 race? Probably Levi Lepheimer, who may be only one of 30 riders in the field! Ah, sod it, the cheats have won, let’s move on.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 28, 2007 @ 7:52 pm
I think the most interesting question is, what if Lance didn’t dope? His streak would then have to count as the greatest athletic achievement of all time.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
May 28, 2007 @ 8:07 pm
Not really, Jim. The TdF used to be the big prize among many pretty-big prizes, one of a string of races. Now, it can be the be-all and end-all. Way back when Jacques Antequil was racing, or even Merckx, it was a great thing to win because it represented an exceptional effort in a long season. Lemond demonstrated that you could show up for one incredibly difficult challenge a year and still be a successful pro. At least as an American.
Also, on the climbs: put your hands near where the stem meets the handlbars, push back so your ass barely hits the saddle, sit up so you get deep breaths (you’re not moving fast enough for aerodynamics to count), and lead with your heels around the spin. Bob your shoulders if you need to, then grab the brake lever mounts if you come out of the saddle, throwing the bike from one side to the next. There’s a poetry about it.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 28, 2007 @ 8:12 pm
Good advice for cycling qua cycling! FWIW, most triathlon books I’ve seen advise that you spin as much as possible, in as low a gear as necessary, and stay in your seat whenever you can, to have more left in the legs for the run.
Comment by Alan Little —
May 29, 2007 @ 3:06 am
I saw an interview a few months ago in a German bike mag with some German bike pro even less famous than Oscar Pereiro – so much less so in fact that I instantly forgot his name – claiming to be clean and to have come fourteenth in the TdF. That’s nowhere near halfway back.