Monday, July 21, 2014

Hello competitiveness, my old friend.

Got up at 4am to participate in the Prospera Valley races today: Michael did the Gran Fondo, and I did the Medio.
It was my second bike race and I didn't train as much as I would have liked, but I completed 88k in less than four hours which was my (slowest) goal.  Overall I wasn't actually happy with my time because this route was 4k shorter than the Penticton route so I thought I would beat my time.  I also tried to minimize my stops at the aid stations (of which there were only three, compared to at least four in Penticton last year - and I stopped at all of them an lolly gagged a bit).
Anyways, my pace this year was 22.5k an hour compared with the Penticton race which was 23.8k an hour. As much as I've enjoyed the transition to cycling, it's been a bit hard to go from being a fairly accomplished marathoner, to a super slow cyclist.  Granted, I'm rocking these races on a hybrid and I'm not clipping in. Also I'm really not pushing it that hard because... I'm not sure why.
The kicker is that cycling is SO MUCH easier than running.  My Medio times are just a bit slower than my marathon times: would you rather run for three or four hours, or cycle?  Cycle it is, right?  On the downhills? You can hit 40k without even doing anything: how cool is that?
I guess what I'm still trying to wrap my head around are the stats.
In Chicago in 2011, I ran a typical marathon for me.  It was a bit hotter than I would have liked, and it was the biggest marathon I had ever been in: more than 35,000 people, so I was a bit claustrophobic.  I finished in the top 13% overall: both sexes included.
Last year's Medio had me in the 81st percentile, and today's race saw me bump "up" to the 70th percentile even though I was slower, so I guess that means I was just riding with a group of really slow people in my age group today and managed to pick off a few more of them.
Here are some more interesting numbers: I biked 88k today.  Michael came in roughly an hour behind me and biked 160k.  So he did 72k more than me, and it only took him an extra hour.
Let me blow your mind a little more.  We watched the Tour de France today, and the cyclists coming in where coming in at roughly Michael's race time today, but they had completed 222k.  So in the same time that Michael was out today, they rode an extra 62k.
Like, what the fuck.
I'm trying to be chill about the whole thing.  It was a great day, the volunteers were amazing, it was cool to kick back and have some lunch and a beer after the race and I loved seeing Michael coming in and have a personal best.  It's a beautiful area to cycle through and I wasn't pushing it the way I could push it, I suppose, but the long and short of it is that people must just be hammering it on these rides, and I'm not.  I have good, big legs and lots of glute power and if I wanted to do the road bike scenario I think I could really make some gains, but I don't want to do the road bike thing because it scares the shit out of me.
The funny thing is, I would kill most of these people road running, and road running is so much harder than cycling.  There's no drafting.  There's no coasting downhill: you are running for 42.2 kilometres and it fucking hurts.
We ended up chatting with this guy that used to run a lot in his twenties and had a PB of something like 2:37 for a marathon, which is amazing.  He had been in the lead peloton on today's ride, and we asked him what he thought was harder: marathoning or cycling.  He said marathoning.
No shit.
So I guess I'm just going around in my head about sucking at a sport that's easier than marathoning, while at the same time being a quite decent marathoner.
And if I think about it I think that it's something that Michael encouraged me to do and I said I would do for fun's sake and that's what I've done.  And I will continue to do them, because they are enjoyable and there's a great community spirit and it's a neat way to see the back roads and I always love to close off roads to traffic.
But to assuage my competitive spirit? Time to get back to running.

3 comments:

  1. Well done

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  2. Ditto! (And I was proud of myself for going on a 9 mile bike ride with my SIL two weeks ago...)

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