It's Goin' Nucular

How exactly do you spell nucular? Anyway, the market is all freaked out today. You look at it once, it's down 200. An hour later, it's down 50. All over the place. But pretty much always down. This would actually make a pretty good course profile. Especially if race organizers could figure out the "more down than up" part.

So I got some very good, unsolicited advice about my training year from a team mate yesterday. Long story short, 700 hours is a lot of training for a donkey trying to live some semblance of a life and have a full time job. There really are a million different stories in the naked city. The one consistent knock against the Joe Friel program is that it's too much volume and not enough effort in the base periods. One compelling argument I read says that you really need to keep working on your V02 Max and threshold capacities all winter. It makes a lot of sense, particularly with my abundance of endurance. If I just do long slow and boring all winter, then I will be training my strength, as everyone is told not to do. Not that I want to get whipsawed into changing my program all over the place three days into it. The best results in the least amount of time, in that order. If the best results cost an hour per week more, it's an hour well spent. If they cost a hard day through base more, wonderful. I know that the super hard and heavy training being practised by some is not for me. Some of the things you read about people doing these days, I wonder how they'll be able to walk in May, much less want to ride their bikes.

The job is progressing at a rate I would almost call very good. Water remains an issue, but our concrete contractor is on site, and we have made our first baby steps in gaining height out of the hole versus digging. We aren't yet officially on our way out of the hole, but we are close. The scaffolding that had been covering the brick building for months is now gone, which changes the way the entire place looks. Our mock up hotel room is coming along about how mock ups do - we get a bunch of stuff done and then a change comes through and we redo everything. Fortunately all of the subs are very anxious to put their best foot forward now - because they want to impress us going into the hjob AND because we have a large amount of work on backlog at a time when many contractors are starting to slow down pretty prodigiously.

Well, as soon as our window installer finishes putting in the last windows in the mock up, I will be headed for the dark and dirty streets of DC for another butt cold and pitch black ride. It's kind of fun to ride in the dark but it's not that great. Actually I think it's the cold I hate more. I don't like spending 10 minutes getting dressed.