OK, I admit it, I’m an obsessive jock. All my earliest memories involve some sort of sport. It was baseball, football, wrestling and diving when I was a kid. My jockular puruits turned to tennis and golf when I hit college (even the football team’s water boy was bigger than me at Penn State). Outside of being “vertically challenged”, I guess the individual sports appealed to the control freak in me. Consequently, I have always been accustomed to training and improving in one sport or another. Cycling and especially racing bikes (MTB and road) however, has challenged me more than all the others. Only wrestling comes close to the cardio vascular requirements of cycling, and only tennis even remotely approaches the stress the legs must endure.

Well, OK… maybe not just like Lance. Nina and I (father/daughter) are indeed ahead of schedule! Chris Charmichael wrote about how Lance was ahead of schedule as he prepared for his first tour event of the season, and well, I at least want to be just like Lance. This Sunday was just our 2nd ride outside since the fall, and we had planned on only 30 miles with some climbing, since last week we did 20 with no climbing. After the first half of the ride, we both felt so good we decided to do the extra 15 miles and “step it up” a bit. Since we put 90% of the climbing at the very end of the ride, we were feeling the fatigue over the last 10 miles.