I laughed, I cried, I almost hurled

If you just finished up road season and don't have any 'cross on your agenda, you're probably going through that weird yet exciting post-racing-bender-phase.  Since this is only my second off-season, I don't have a good grasp of what to expect for this phase, how long it should last, or how much discipline to use.  Luckily there's advice from fitness experts to help, but more on that in a sec.

Last year after road season I felt strangely angry.  Every morning I'd go to grab my bike for a ride, look at it for a second and think, "I'll show them!" and then put on my running shoes instead.  And I'm no runner, so really I just threw on some random sneakers, but more importantly, whom was I showing, and what?  I ran a lot of angry miles last fall, finally ending up with an achilles injury (according to the doctor it was due to the aforementioned sneakers), and unable to run or even ride for a few weeks. 

This year I prepared to be that angry runner again, scheduling a running shoe fitting and even planning to temporarily cut myself off from friends if I became an intolerable jerk.  Surprisingly, I'm not angry, just bummed from finally acknowledging the numerous personal crises that I managed to ignore during road season.  But mostly I'm fed up with the self-discipline of training, so I came up with a list of "undisciplined" things to do:

• Stay up late (done)
• Eat a hamburger (not yet)
• Watch the Phillies' post-season (unfortunately, that was done all too quickly)
• Have a dinner party (done x2)
• Cook something elaborate (done, see above)
• Go for long rides without worrying about a training agenda (done)
• Go to a show at Johnny Brenda's (done)
• All-night party (saturday night was really close...still feeling ill)
• Go running (nope- kinda banged up my ribs in Boston; still hurts to run)
• Quit the leg press and squats for a while, do arms instead just for funsies (OK, I did only the quitting part; upper body still hurts see above)



The Besnard Lakes at Johnny Brendas

 So that sums up the first two weeks of the off-season.  Not a bad time, but it looks like according to the experts, I might be a little too far off the training wagon.  For this 1- to 6-week "Transition Period" as Joe Friel calls it, Friel suggests that athletes stay active with unstructured training in non-cycling sports, and he also warns to not be a "couch potato."  Oh.  Speaking of potatoes, Racing Weight author Matt Fitzgerald suggests that athletes gain no



Bread pudding recipe from Philly restaurant Standard Tap

 more than 8% of their race weight in the off-season.  No comment.  So I guess it's time to add a little structure to the "unstructured" training plan, lest this off-season become more tragic than the Phillies post-season.