In my recent article about my first ever Individual Time Trial, I said, “The truth is that I hated it… and loved it.” The rest of the post dealt mainly with why I hated it. By the end of the missive I made the comment, “Next time I’ll talk about why I loved it and why I’m looking forward to getting out there again.” Well, as usual, things came up and the “next time” covered something else. So, today I’m going to give some reasons why I loved the Time Trial.

The first thing to get out of the way is that I loved the pain. It is the primary love-hate portion of the endeavor. However, there is just something about pushing yourself to your limit and going on. In life there are many times when you reach that point emotionally, professionally, or spiritually. Those aspects of life are pretty complicated and it takes more than just gritting your teeth and continuing to churn to reach success.

The Individual Time Trial allows you to take that ball of life’s frustrations and turn it into something real. For a bit you can take all the pressure and stomp on it with every stroke. Here is something you can control. Here is an opportunity to push through and feel the pain knowing you will find an end to it. Best of all, the pain has a measurable purpose. The better you ride above the pain, the better your time.

The second thing that draws me to the Individual Time Trial is that it is individual. You are racing against yourself. In other forms of bicycle racing, you are part of an organism. Every move made by another affects you. That can mean, as in the recent Giro d’Italia, that you could be leading the race at one moment and caught up in an accident the next. It also means that if  you are smart, you can use the tactics of the team or the riders around you to win without using all your cards.

In the ITT, you have to lay it all out. It is just you and your bike against the environment. The wind, the road service, the temperature, and any number of variables are your only competition. Oh yes, you can’t forget that top competitor — the clock. How much time does it take you to lay it all on the line and overcome the variables is all that matters. How well you do or how badly you ride is all on you.

That leads me to the third siren call of the lonely ride. Data. There are all sorts of things to measure and evaluate. Because it is individual and the only thing you are competing against are measurable environmental elements, you can recreate your effort by looking at the data. You can then go out and do the same course again and compare that data. Minute changes can make the difference in seconds — even tens of seconds. It drives you to say, “If I just did such-and-such, I could have saved this amount of seconds.”

So, I am looking forward to the next Individual Time Trial I’ll have an opportunity to race. Right now life is so busy, I’m not sure when that will be. All the end of the school year programs, etc. are really putting a hole in my training. Thankfully, I have a coach who understands and is working with me. I guess it is just one more of those frustrations I can iron out when I start feeling the pain of my next race of truth.

Don’t forget about the 2010 Ride for Mike! Give today

and you could help us pass the $3000 mark!

 

Tags: Time Trial

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 7:25 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.