Learning From Past Mistakes

I don’t always make the best decisions. Often my eagerness, “dang let’s go get ‘em” attitude, and ability to suffer through just about anything gets me into trouble. This often lead me to overestimate my ability or fitness. Nothing illustrates this more then the year 2015; otherwise known as “The Year I Quit Cycling”. For a more in-depth write up of why I quite see my very first blogpost; the primary reason was injuries. But how exactly did I get injured in the first place and how could I avoid making the same mistakes in 2020?

Last week I was digging around in my Strava profile looking for the GPS record from Big Frog 65 in 2015. I couldn’t find it, which wasn’t surprising as I tended not to use GPS for races back then. I like to obsess over the data I see on those and will overthink the race if I don’t make it to checkpoint “X” by a certain time. I always used it for training though, which is when I realized that training data from leading up to Big Frog was……sparse. Looking farther back into my Strava data made me remember just how little I was riding leading into 2015.

Leading into late Fall 2014 I had been doing very little riding. But teaming up with a friend on a 6 Hour race reinvigorated my desire to race, so I quickly signed up for Oak Ass 50 and 6 Hours of Dry Creek, neither of which I was in shape for. Then came the decisions to do Snake and Big Frog 65. The only problem was that suddenly time change hit and I wasn’t doing much riding. From November through March I was lucky to get in 1-2 rides a week and spent zero time on the trainer. So when I rolled into Big Frog 65 that year I was working on little more then one month of riding more then once a week. Not surprisingly, Big Frog was a bit of a calamity. I was doing OK for most of the race, but had a mini-meltdown on the last 7 miles because my back gave out.

This became a recurring theme throughout the year. I’d start out strong, then fall apart towards the end because of my back, or legs, or whatever. I figured I could half-ass my way into racing shape by just signing up for long races and doing a few long rides here and there. I spent much of my time prepping for the upcoming SORBA Chattanooga races, drinking beer, watching Netflix, and going out to bars. I failed to consider that at the time I was 36 years old and couldn’t just pull myself off the couch and ride for 65 miles. My ambition far out matched my commitment to training and it stayed that way for much of the year. As my back got worse and worse, I rode less and less. Which eventually led to the meltdowns that were Iron Mountain 100 and Black Bear Rampage.

So when did I injure my back exactly? Looking back I firmly believe it was during Big Frog 65. I was in no way ready to ride that race on a full rigid, super stiff, carbon singlespeed. Perhaps if I was riding a geared bike I might have had less of a problem. The last 7 miles of that race was intolerable. For the rest of 2015 I was constantly fighting with my back. It got so bad that by the end of the year I couldn’t do ONE lap at Enterprise South Nature Park without wanting throw the bike in the woods and leave it there.

Since then I’ve felt some remnants of that old injury, but nothing like I experienced in 2015. Its also taking much longer for my back to start hurting. While I might not be as fast as I was back then (yet); I strongly feel like I’m in much better shape. Both endurance wise and overall functional strength. I’m riding more then I have in years and this will help me later in the year. I’m looking forward to Big Frog 65 this year and the first big test of all the work I’ve put in thus far. April 25th is circled on my calendar.