I’m not a math guy.
At a certain point I really hated math. Maybe it was because it required attention to detail in a way that I didn’t like, maybe I found it somehow mentally restrictive. That sounds dumb, but math is the same thing one way or another every time. I saw no spontaneity in math, no feel, no soul. It was just numbers.
With Strava and power meters on both the road and mountain bikes I now have access to a ton of data, and I’ve been geeking out pretty hard on everything I can find. Most interesting is the lap data for races, specifically that the guys who are killing individual segments or railing the fastest lap times aren’t the winners. Pacing is key- and I’ve known that for a while, but seeing it recorded with more mid-race insight makes it much more obvious.
As I spin up my training again I’m thinking about all of this and trying to balance some ‘cross-specific training with the desire to give some local mouth breathers the old Strava bitch slap. I pretty much never go all out on short segments, but at some point here I will. Not for the sake of a workout, but for the sake of pride, or at least letting some of the locals know that I’m here.
And the numbers say I’m getting faster.