Friday, May 28, 2010

good pain, bad pain? just pain

After yet another epic day of holiday chill I find myself not looking forward to the return of work life. Of course my worker mentality will take over and I'll be back at it with no questions. That or the bank account will get low in the fun money department. It's also the last few days before a crazy block of racing. For the next month I'll be playing at 4 different places 4 weeks in a row with 2 back to back short races followed by 2 longer events.

I started to think about the difference between a Canada Cup/Ontario Cup approach and a Marathon/8 hour race. Both hurt but it's a different type of hurt. An easy comparison. A Canada Cup race feels a lot like taking a sledgehammer and smashing your little finger with it as hard as you can. An 8 hour is more like putting your hand in a vice and slowly tightening it until all the bones shatter. It's a slower process that the brain takes a little longer to realize how much things are hurting. It's that comfortable numb. Of course the next day the results feel the same, sore, pain, exhaustion, etc. I admit that I prefer the long continued pain, it's so progressive. Those short races you just know it's coming, like it or not. Of course the 24 hour done tag this year will have both of those affects on the body. I'm looking forward to Solstice.

Great chill ride with the coach yesterday with problems solved, stories told and scenery watched. The Big Chute loop was the ride of choice, there was no traffic except for the deer flies. The suckers were huge and managed to keep a good pace with us. There was no stopping in certain sections, even for a flat tire had it happened. The flies were huge and the swarm was large enough that they probably could have picked up a small child and flown away with him. Besides the flies, which will be gone soon, it's still my favourite road loop. I was riding the Anthem and had thoughts of playing on some of the Canadian Shield rocks but it never happened. Guess I'll just have to ride it again.

Hmmm what to do today, drink more coffee is the first thing on the list.

3 comments:

pg said...

The analogy here that i would use is

do you tear your band-aid off fast or slow ??

24hr races and marathons seem to be attractive to more and more people because the bandaid is torn off slow ... as a society we have grown to prefer this in many aspects of our life. Apart from sport, consider relationships where we don't say what we mean or hold back lies but torture ourselves for extended periods of time vs. just letting it out and being done with it.

The question with life or sport would be why not get it over with quick ?

Matt Spak said...

Maybe I'm the stragne one but I say screw the band-aid. Leave the wound open and continue to pick at the scab until it leaves a scar. Scares are cheaper than tattoo's and have better stories.

John Bragdon said...

If I'm interpreting the philosopher a.k.a Peter, proper he is pro endurance...I'll bring my two cents and say a blend of the two is the ideal way to fine tune the psyche..good to hear you are tagg'in the solstice..I myself, chose to enter into the abyss of HANSOLO this year by warming up to the solstice with a Tag....my next comment....I recall you weren't doing HANSOLO...what up...seems like you're preppring in the right way :)