Friend or Foe?

So what are you doing at 3 a.m.? This is what I'm staring at every morning at that time. It's either the pleasure or the pain that I start my morning off with. When I decided to start racing again, I tried to get my training rides in in the evenings after work. That was either taking too much time away from my family or my rides were so short they weren't much good for anything other than an active recovery day. So, I decided the only way I was going to get the time in that I needed was to use time that only I would miss. That time happens to come at 3 o'clock every weekday morning. Some mornings it is brutal and I dread it, other mornings it's great.

You're body doesn't always function the way you want it to at three in the morning. For a majority of this season and all of last season, I trained by HR. Get up at three and check your HR, now get on a bike and see how responsive it is. Some mornings it was so sluggish I would just about kill myself trying to get it into your prescribed zones. But it was effective and it got the job done. In July I finally got a PowerTap. I was pretty skeptical about using power and thought there really couldn't be much benefit using power over HR. I was wrong. Power is amazing and has opened a whole new world to training for me. Now it doesn't matter what your HR is or how you're feeling, you're body can always push out the watts. Sure some morning it might be harder than others but you're not going to jump on the trainer and feel like you are putting out a zone 5 effort and seeing a zone 2 HR. I have been able to pin point my weaknesses on the bike and start to train to them, where you weren't able to with HR. It's awesome. I was skeptical about getting an iPod a couple years ago when all my friends were telling me how great they were. I finally broke down and got one and it's changed my music listening life. It's great.

Getting up at 3 a.m. is not my ideal time to get a training ride in. It's my ONLY time. I've seen just about every episode of the X Effect and Parental Control MTV has to offer. I've watched Tour de France videos until I tell you exactly what is going to happen next. Of course, everything I watch is muted and reading the subtitles so I don't wake up my daughter. You might notice the little white box, next to the alarm clock, on the table behind my bike. That's the baby monitor, because even though right now is daddy's training time, all the time is daddy time.

If anyone is up and riding at 3 a.m. and would like someone to talk to, give me a call. I can get my bluetooth out or something.