The Vomit Zone

Let’s have a training update, shall we? It has been awhile, I know, but if I gave you the play-by-play of my day, every day, it would look like I just copied and pasted the same day here, over and over . . . groundhog day. This is good, though; I am just working away, putting one deposit after another in the bank for a big race season. I know that the more steps forward that I can take in the next few months, the more I can race this summer.

I picture this “bank account” each day to motivate my in my training. I know that the bigger a balance I can accrue during these few months, the more withdrawals I can make come race season. To this extent, I have been spending a lot of time on the verge of vomiting in training. This feeling seems to be the theme of this winter: short and hard, short and hard, short and hard. I have been spending lots of time like this on the bike.

One of my favorite training partners here in Tucson, Leanda Cave (who, sadly, is not here this winter), had a set of a relatively small number of 1-minute efforts on the bike that she would do often. She would always tell me about how she was fearing the session—how much it would hurt.

I didn’t get it. I could not imagine why someone would be scared of one-minute efforts on the bike; how much could one really hurt oneself in one minute?! I always told Leanda that this was one of the many differences between us as athletes (one of the million reasons she was in a different zip code, that is!): “I just could not make myself hurt like that in a minute—I just don’t have that gear.”

Or so I thought, until the past few weeks. It took some months of practice, but I now am spending quality time nearly every second day in what I will call the vomit zone. This means literally pushing myself on the bike or run til I feel like I am hyperventilating, about to throw up, and cannot see because my head is spinning and my eyes are watering from the effort. I actually intentionally do my hard hill efforts on the bike on a quiet, dead-end road at a resort because I don’t trust myself on the open road to ride straight or have my wits about me when I have to make a u-turn at the top of each repeat. It’s that bad.

But what is cool is that I can see the work working. Riding with the GCM is more fun than ever because I can finally keep up on the annoying, short, steep hills that I have never been able to avoid getting dropped on before. My legs used to shut down every time I got up to about 220 watts as they almost never went there; now they don’t even notice because it’s nothing compared to what we’ve been putting them through on interval days.

Back to it! 2 down, 2 to go today . . .