“Is that all you want me to do?” was the question I posed skeptically to my coach after reviewing the next block of training he had prescribed. I should know better. Throughout the season we become accustomed to small cycles, three weeks of hard work followed by a week of diminished volume to allow ourselves to rest, recover, and regenerate so we might continue our ascent, pushing our boundaries toward uncharted levels of strength. But somehow the long arc, and especially its inevitable but imperative down slope, is harder to come to terms with.
This feeling is compounded if you’ve arrived at the end of the competition season with the legs and mental acuity that comes as a result of a meticulously planned and carefully timed taper so you are at the apogee of your fitness in order to achieve a year-long objective. When you invest months committing to a program tailored to making you fast and efficient, your body composition optimal, remarkable things begin to happen. Efforts that might regularly put you on the rivet become almost nonchalant. You execute with confidence and panache, that most sought after of cycling virtues. You develop a kind of telepathy with the beast that is the race, sensing its ebbs and flows, anticipating crucial moments, and letting patience prevail when panic seems most logical.
Riding a peak is an immense rush. You’re playing with fire, teetering on a knife’s edge between your body’s ability to perform anything you deem necessary and sheer exhaustion, where your muscular system, your immune system, your mental capacity waits for the slightest push in the wrong direction so it can rebel and send your fitness tumbling down like a house of cards. But while you are balancing precariously on that edge, you are in complete command. You are Philippe Petit striding fearlessly between the tops of the twin towers. You are, as we say, on form. If cycling can be classified as an addiction, then form is the dragon we all continue to chase.
But like brilliant autumn foliage or springtime cherry blossoms in full bloom, being on the highest level of form is fleeting and ephemeral. If all went according to plan, you’ve accomplished your objective and the adrenaline rush fueled by such success persists well beyond the hour or two post race. You are hungry for more. Ravenous. Anything is possible. You are invincible. You have visions of denying fate and thwarting the inevitable. But it’s all magical thinking.
And when it hits you, that accumulated fatigue both physical and mental, you realize the omniscience of those managing your athletic life. Suddenly, “play on the cross bike” begins to sound less like punishment and more like a welcome respite from the structure you generally thirst for and thrive on. Though there remains a hint of reluctance within your mind, you release yourself from organization, from routine, from the form you have nurtured and cultivated for a season you wish could last just two or three weeks longer. It’s never easy letting go of form. But if we only did what was easy, we would never progress.
