I finally got a decent 20′ power number. 400 watts today, boo yeah. And there were another 10 watts in me that I never got out! A Garmin guy going down Lemmon on the other side of the road dropped his mouth in complete shock as he saw me flying up the mountain with a trail of other’s broken bike parts drenched in the blood of my helpless victims that were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Actually he just waved. But I imagined he dropped his jaw and bulged his eyes, which made me go harder.
I don’t know if any of you agonize about intervals like I do sometimes. The pain, the fear, the worry about not reaching your expected numbers. Today was one of those days. As I rode to the base of Mt. Lemmon, which has an ideal 5% grade for doing threshold intervals, I argued with myself. “I feel good, no. I don’t feel good. I feel OK. No I feel like crap and I’m just going to do tempo instead. No you’re not you wimp!!” My better side won like it usually does, and I began the interval, tricking my weak self by saying, “don’t worry, we’ll just do 10 minutes and see how we feel. If we’re too tired, then we’ll just do tempo for the next couple of hours and call it even, OK? How does that sound, champ?” Little did my weak self know, I was going to do the full interval if it meant falling off my bike into a cacti.
I finished the interval with too much left but was still pleased, and rode up the rest of the way to 9 miles. Then it was all the way down and back to town to get water at the McDonalds, then back up to 9 miles again averaging 338 watts for the 45′ climb. I love days like this. By the way, who actually goes to McDonalds? Every time I go in there (twice today) it’s packed inside and the drive-through stretches way out into the parking lot. Why? Why????? If you want fast food, especially in Tucson, there are hundreds if not hundreds of millions of taco shops that are infinitely better than the crap they have at McDonalds. Does advertising really work this well? Are you people (not you) that influenced by TV? Next time I walk into that McDonalds to get water, it had better not be packed full of you idiots. Or else I’m going to vomit all over the floor, customers, employees, and cash register in my disgust of a failed governmental system that awards outright lying, monopolies, and war that leave Americans fat, wasteful, and stupid and the rest of the resentful world poor and running for cover (possibly to a McDonalds) to escape the raining barrage of Haliburton bombs. Hum…where did that come from?
KENNETT PETERSON 