Desire, part 1

At the start of August, I had pretty good fitness and started feeling all smug about it. This attitude usually doesn't end well for me.

I decided to go to the Patterson Pass Road Race for the Masters 35+ district championship road race to test myself against the best, and promptly was served my own gluteus maximus on a fancy plate. Great power numbers (for me). Thorough butt-whipping.

It was brutal but fair. I had good fitness but I hadn't managed all the details. One in particular was body weight - bike racing is pretty sensitive to weight but I wasn't in fighting trim and I'd been basically lying to myself about it, pretending it didn't matter much.

I read a study around the same time that indicated running performance correlated with body weight even more than cycling. So tightly that you got around 1% faster for each 1% body weight you lost, assuming all the normal caveats (as in, you visited a doctor, know your current lean mass and target a healthy loss rate and final body fat percentage between 6-10% but not lower unless you like being ill physically or mentally)

So I'm really glad I had that wakeup call - knowing I had one more big A race this year (Austin 70.3 triathlon) that I really really wanted to do well in and 3 months to go, I decided to get my act together while I still had a realistic opportunity to lose the new weight I'd been carrying around since my son arrived.

There are a lot of things you have to do to have excellent performances, and I'm sure I'm missing a few, but this is one of them and I got this one right at least. 

So from one perspective - this is what desire looks like. 10 pounds in 3 months - it can be done and I'm not superhuman - maybe this will motivate who ever is reading this if you've been contemplating a change.

2 days to go till race day