Write?

I am not entirely sure that I nailed the idea. Which is, I think, one of the most important of the several reasons why anyone, from Tom Robbins, Hemingway or John Irving all the way down to me, writes. To clearly convey a thought, premise, concept or simply to tell a compelling story. The practice has created somewhat of a daily challenge for me. Somewhere, at sometime as I do something starting at sunrise and finishing well after it sets, I will get hit straight between the eyes with a what was once elegantly described as the ‘lightening bolt of inspiration’. It can be a single and simple phrase, part of a larger and more complex work or a combination of both, with the acceptance criteria being that it must contain an interesting truth, uncommon beauty or cosmic relevance. That usually is a strong enough message to sharpen my normally dull and distracted attention. 

Yesterday it was the possibility that we have been preforming our testing protocols, all these many years, wrong. Or at least not 100% correct. Please see the link below. There always remains the fact that if you take away all the science, art and tangential benefits of indoor cycle training and ‘miss’ on the gold of power training, you still get in a dang good workout, something we used to call a DGWoo. There is, I firmly believe, huge benefit to simply getting on your bike and riding for an hour, especially considering that a large percentage of our core demographic is retired and collecting social security benefits. If everything after that is gravy, using the advanced technologies available to us and gathering at structured times to preform protocols demonstrated to be of high value, a dang good workout must be the desert course of the gastronomic metaphor. 

My assignment then is twofold. One: To do the research, find the facts and arrange them into as functional, effective and enjoyable format as possible. Two: To take the sum of that effort and create a marketing campaign around it to manufacture adequate buzz with goal of putting more butts onto more saddles. To borrow from WP Kinsella, ‘if you build it, they will come.’

I have found over the years, we started the RCVman blog in 2007, that this formula isn’t exactly revolutionary. I am the first to admit that my penchant for ‘blog as diary’ or ‘writing as therapy’ or even the ‘workout log with pictures’, floats few boats and fills still fewer sails. But I am not doing this for fame or fortune (for full disclosure). I do this for practice, for discipline, what Julia Cameron calls the ‘morning pages’, the right to write, and I do it because in some corner of my subconscious, in that deep, protected and sacred cellular compartment called spirit, it find this as fascinating as the human condition or exercise physiology. I must write in the same way and with similar urgency that I must ride, run (and occasionally swim.) 

That keeps me going. It is like the book you can’t put down, or the series you have to binge watch. It has forced me to look at things in a different way. To search for meaning. To close my eyes to see. 

I have the gut feeling that every day some golden nugget of beauty will be revealed to me, assuming that I care enough to search. That each day will provide another clue as to what this is all about. Some days I feel like an actor desperately in search of the plot. What am I doing? What am I looking for? Who done it? Why are there so many obstacles in the way? 

Nail this scene. Enough quality scenes put together complete the film. 

Lastly today, please remain confident that this movie in which you are producer, writer, director and star, will have a happy ending. 

Break a leg on this one: 

TWO 8-MINUTE TIME TRIALS

In The Time-Crunched Cyclist, Chris Carmichael and Jim Rutberg offer an even shorter field test. Once again, you perform a thorough warm-up, then ride as hard as possible for eight minutes. Spin easy for 10 minutes and then do another all-out eight-minute effort. The average power for the higher of your two efforts is approximately 90 percent of FTP. For example, if your observed average power is 280 watts for the second eight-minute time trial (in this case, the higher of the two, eight-minute hard efforts), estimated FTP is 252 watts.