Thanks for reading the newsletter. I hope your health is good and your week is the best it can be.

Stronger Riders

We’ve all seen riders that seem to have super-human abilities. They drop us and leave us to ride alone with the pace heats up. These people are freaks of nature for sure and have the ability to put out watts well above normal thresholds. I highly recommend going for rides with these riders at least once if you never have done so. You may be saying to yourself at this moment “hey, wait a minute, I’m not a racer, I don’t like racing, I just want to cruise!” That may be accurate when you’re looking for a cruise type ride, but, here is the rub. You will appreciate and enjoy cycling more when you get your butt handed to you once or twice on a spirited ride. The amount of pain you will be put in will guide you to either seek out and enjoy the fast pace and strive for maximum speed or to steer clear and enjoy your own pace. This is one of the gems of cycling. Even if you are not a racer going out on the group ride regularly with the fast guys, a spicy ride will open your eyes to things you never thought were possible on two wheels. Believe in yourself and go for it. You’ll find out where you are in fitness levels and where you should be in the future. Personally I won’t be racing any criteriums anytime soon but I will be leading some gravel rides with the grey haired crowd very soon. That is my place, slow and steady.

Age

I’m sure you remember when you were younger and you had this deep desire to be older so you could get out of the house, or gain more freedom with a drivers license. The future surely seemed like it would be better if you could just get there faster. Then when you aged up and achieved the things you thought older folks needed and enjoyed and then realized that maybe the desire to be older wasn’t so desirable. Now you’re looking backwards in time and pondering the past more and more. I’m at that age now where I find myself and my friends talking about the past a lot. We reminisce about the good times we had, friends that were lost, and how the “good old days” seemed to be better than now. So, where is this going? It’s going to now, today, the present. That’s all you or I have. This moment right now is where we are. I’m trying more and more to live in the moment. As cliche as it sounds it’s really a truth that more people should live by. Wow, now I’m sounding old! To achieve this I am trying to slow time by reducing the desire of want. The nonstop want for more never fully actualizes into what we thought it would be, so we desire more and more and more. For this reason I am only buying one bike next year and it won’t be a race bike. It will be a comfortable cruising machine capable of carrying a burrito or two and that’s what matters most to me today, at this moment.

Thanks for reading, have a great week.

Peace,
Paul