Intervals between breaths

GO!

Recovery Based Training - Part 3.

Another blogger actually read my prior posts  regarding recovery based training (Part 1 and Part 2) and had some important concerns and questions. You can read our full exchange here.

That conversation made me realize that I had not updated my progress on this training plan. So I decided to take a look at how things went in 2012.

A notch above: The North Country 600K and the Kancamagus affair.

I ride long stretches - 20 miles, 30 miles, 50 miles - on remote roads. I pedal past mountain lakes, through wildlife refuges in Northern New Hampshire, the North Woods and over the White Mountains of Maine. In this unfamiliar vastness, at times as distant as the blue peaks on the horizon, at times as close as the thicket of trees edged along the shoulder, I am uncertain but eager. A child of adventure taking his first steps, wavering but willing. Without the barriers of a car or the silencing noise of a motor, an unbound consciousness tentatively reaches out for the edges of the world, stretches toward the distant mountains, rises toward the cumulus clouds, teeters at the edge of the wilderness, learning to find its way.

I leave invisible traces as I travel through this place. Molecules of my DNA infuse the North Woods. My breath joins the cool air. My sweat seeps into the asphalt. But this place also leaves its traces in me. My legs and my lungs intimately know the measure of Dixville Notch and Kancamagus Pass in ways beyond mere miles and meters. Hours spent climbing mountain passes are not soon forgotten. Between the conversations, the arguments, the dances, disappointments and triumphs, we practically had a relationship.

Along the way, thoughts bubble up and burst into ideas and emotions - at times elated, at times melancholy, at times at peace. Rain falls sporadically from a turbulent sky. Flowers bloom in colors that overflow from the fullness of the summer rains. The road rises, falls, twists and turns and still I ride. Always moving forward until movement becomes its own stillness.
 

First Friday Writings for Randos - "You. Are. Not. Giving. Up!"

{First Friday Writings for Randos - A monthly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This month it's an excerpt from . . .
 

Trans Iowa

By Mauricio Babilonia
'sconnyboy

The birds began to sing and the sky began to brighten for a second time. We walked another hill. Pete and HB pulled ahead, but I stayed with Ben as his mood continued to deteriorate. Shortly after dawn, Ben and I came upon HB waiting for us at an intersection.

"Our navigator is gone."
"Where is he?"
"I dunno. He took off."

Oyster Creek 200K - The calm before the storm.

The Oyster Creek 200K undulates like easy waves on a breeze brushed pond. No significant climbs means no screaming descents but the varying terrain intersperses spin worthy flats with opportunities to rise from the saddle and power over gentle rises. It is a good course to enjoy a fast ride or a merciful one.

Great Allegheny Passage 2013: 73 miles with 9 kids and 8 adults in 2 days= 1 fantastic trip!

I am the locomotive. Steady chugga chugging up the long long climb from Cumberland Md. to Frostburg, Md. on the Great Allegheny Passage.

The children riding in line behind me, the "cars" of the train, sing a loud and joyful cadence, as only children can, over the soft rolling crunch of the fine gravel path.

"Hey bay-bee"

My five year old daughter's voice, as pure and as sweet and as precious as the rainbows that slide on the surface of a soap bubble, responds - in a quiet voice tinged with excited expectation - from the trailer that I pull up the hill. 

"Someone's calling my name"

"Hey bay-bee"

"I think I hear it again"

"You're wan-ted on the tele-phone"

"Well if its not sister -then I'm not home."

"Hey sis-ter"

Now it's sister's turn. 

The song doesn't end. The call and response goes in circles, naming each rider, until every car in the train has had his and her turn, or two or three or more turns, as we ascend the long steady hill on a warm Sunday morning in July lifted by song and sharing.

First Friday writing for Randos - Easy Does It

{First Friday Writings for Randos - A monthly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This month it's an excerpt from . . .
 

Easy Does It 

By Bill Strickland 
Editor at large for Bicycling Magazine

When my bag of jelly beans drops onto the pavement of Dogwood Lane, I almost don’t turn around. We have just a while ago come off Coon ­Hollow, which is a road we would ride for the name alone but as a bonus happens to be smooth dirt packed as hard as any pavement, with such little canopy that the country sky sometimes curves blue and near-feeling from one of earth’s edges to the other, and with a ramshackle mansion of a barn that provokes sadness and wonder each time I pass—though I have been doing so for more than a decade.

Dogwood becomes one of those climbs that at first is barely so then can take your knees off here and there over a couple miles. But that is only after you disappear into its deep shadowed woods. Its bright opening slope sustains the reverie Coon Hollow began, with sunny farmed fields to either side, and split-rail fences gone gray from weather and time, and a rural community ballpark where a great home-run ball could be lost forever in the soy. This is where I am when my jelly beans fall.