A brick in time

“A brick is a brick,, it is 20kms of training,, so 100kms you get 5 bricks,

Each brick is placed on the ground,(flat line) and when you have 10 bricks,

You start again on the bricks and build a wall.

So you have a wall with 5 layers of bricks on it,= 10000kms,

Target is 50 lines of bricks = 10,000

Easy peeezy”  Geoff Smith, alias Bicycle Rider France, alias Old Sog Smith, alias my very good friend and mentor on two wheels

The snow is falling, lightly but stubbornly, and the temperature went 25 degrees below freezing last night and climbed to only twelve degrees below freezing today.  No chance for a ride outside, not from our perch on top of Pilot Knob, until the sun burns off the slick roads.

Another day on the rollers.  I have my Ghent Wevelgem dvd set up on the computer; it’s the 2005 edition of the race won by, not to be a spoiler four and a half years later, by Nico Mattan, a spunky little Belgian who passess Flecha in the last 100 meters of a nearly 5 hour race to win.  Great stuff.  I bring the wheels up to a spin and hit the Start button on the Garmin.  We’re doing spinups today, a 15m warmup, then eight 30 sec low power, high cadence seated sprints with a five minute easy spin between each.

For the first two sprints, there is sludge in the legs.  The cadence gets to 120rpm before the smoothness goes away and I get bouncy and have to throttle back a tad.  The last six sprints are better, topping out at 135 before the bounciness appears.  The point is to develop leg speed and a smooth spin. 

After the third or fourth spinup, I notice how slowly the thirty seconds is passing.  I’m not dying or anything, but each breath comes and goes and the seconds slow to a slowly measured trickle.  I look up and see the break of six men slowly being brought back and then the five second beep, beep, beep, beep, beep and the monitor says Rest 5 min and everything in the world accelerates towards the next beep, beep, beep, beep, beep of the following interval.  Time surges and pulls back in direct opposition to my effort on the bike.  Criteriums are like this.  60 laps to go and then after the pulsing and contraction and expansion of efforts, four good efforts on each lap, it’s 3 laps to go and the the last laps take up most of the time as each motion, sound, click of a gear shift and touch of brake become a conscious mix in the mind, deserving notice, a thought, perhaps a reaction.  The bell lap and then time stops.  I age a year during the final four turns and then the shout, grimace, surge and dive down into the quiet of the effort and the line.

Spinups.  I travel through time and watch the snow fall as I wind down.  Nico wins the dramatic finish.  I look at my monitor, ahh, one more brick.