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.

This is why, when I win and place in my age class (the one and only thing to look forward to in the “golden years”), and finish in the top 3rd of the rest of the field, I feel pretty darn good about myself. I do indeed train for these races, but I never had the opportunity to do serious training indoors. My training indoors has always been one of desperation – where I desperately fight to keep my fitness level from being decimated by too many Christmas cookies and the winter insulating blubber that always seems to wrap itself around my waistline.

Opening Global Ride Training Center has changed all that. Not only did we build the facility specifically for indoor training, but for the last 3 years I’ve been soaking up knowledge about cycling training, Heart Zones, power meters, metabolic testing and all the tools readily available to any athlete that cares about their progress. This combination has probably been partially to blame for my first blog post here – where I made the insane decision to ride the first 5 stages of the Giro (provided that Lance agreed to give me a head start on the road ahead of him).

So naturally, I’ve been hard at it for one big reason – I don’t want to fail the Livestrong foundation, and I don’t want to fail myself. Oh yeah, and one other thing… the natural desire to avoid pain. Having ridden in the dolomites in ‘06 before I had this facility and the knowledge about real training, I know what it feels like riding there without being properly prepared. At the time, I thought I was ready. But after day 1 in the Italian Alps, it was abundantly clear – I was in deep doo-doo… the word clueless came to mind quite a bit. Even though I appeared to be suffering less than many of the others, the sufferage was stellar.

That was just 3 years ago, and those memories are like it was 3 days ago. I did indeed finish the rides, and it clearly made me stronger – to the point where I was crushing my training routes at home with 20% improvements in time or speed. For two weeks after my last foray in the dolomites I rode like Superman – it was the closest to an “out of body” experience I have ever had. It was like I was watching myself kill climbs that used to make me cry for my momma. There was however, a steep price to pay for these results. We climbed 7,000 to 10,000 feet per day – it was like a crash course in mega-climbing. Now I know why the pros live over there during the race season.

I know that the only way to avoid a repeat painfest (especially considering we will be covering almost twice as many miles) is to train smarter and harder. The more pain I endure here, the less I will meet out there. I usually say “train smarter, not harder”… good advice for the average cyclists and athlete in general. However, if you’re going to the Giretto, and you have less than 2 months to get it together, you better do both!