The joys of racing...

For anyone who does any sort of racing, I ask this question:

When do you ever feel good?

Think about it. For me, I do endurance races (side note: even though the events I sign up for are deemed as "recreational" and not "a race", whenever you get 2 or more cyclists together you just made a declaration of racing) and as such they involve a hell of a lot of training. So with training, the idea is to start from a good base, build off of it, and when race day comes you are in awesome shape for that event. But break it down. When you train, the idea is to push and push your body up that fitness mountain to get to the top where you are ready to go. Along the way, if you're doing it right, you occassionally overload the body and break it down. Anyone who has ever done an interval workout knowns this concept well. Unless you push your body, you're not gonna get better. So with training comes pain.

And then the big day comes, and now you go into race mode. The fast mode. The give it all you got mode. You launch from the gate and away you go, and how you go. The body is pushed and pushed and screaming the whole way.

So what about after the event. Don't you get to feel good then? Ha. If you are asking that question, you've never gotten to experience what it's like to be recovering from your body eating itself all day.

When do you feel good? Never. It's all about seeing how much pain you can put your body through. And yet those of us who do it choose to continue doing it. We are asked why, but there is no good answer.