gearing up

I’m doing a job. On myself.

What seemed like a leisurely start on 25 December—six months to get fit, albeit with no slacking and a climb in every ride—has morphed into something altogether more intense, and scientific, since I pulled The Lance Armstrong performance program off the shelf. 

Meanwhile in Bendigo it’s unseasonably not summer. Summer here is three months of cloudless skies and a merciless sun pounding you into the asphalt. Our one day of summer, December 31, was 39 degrees, humidity 12 per cent.

In the past two days my rain gauge has recorded 28mls of gentle and consistent rain. The bureau forecasts four more days of the same. The skies are grey as a dog’s guts, the air sticky as a glazed bun. The humidity is 87 per cent.

So I plonk my bum in a chair and get into the D and M chapters of the Carmichael Training System (CTS)—HRMs, field tests, training zones, Tempo, FastPedal, PowerIntervals and FlatSprints.

Dodging showers I take the Sigma Sport PC 14 heart rate monitor with the dead battery to a jeweller but the fat lady behind the counter won’t sing: replacing the battery is “too fiddly”. No such qualms for the jeweller on the other side of the street where another fat lady does the job for ten bucks. Last time it cost $25+ at Mr Minute in a Melbourne shopping plaza. I was outraged then and now.

HRM taken care of, I duck more showers and roll the back wheel from the old banger into the bike shop. After ten minutes manipulation in the august hands of the senior mechanic it emerges somewhat rounder and back on the banger mounted on the trainer it seems to make consistent contact with the roller.

The rain keeps pattering down in lifeless vertical lines, so it’s cycle class at the gym for this black duck. I push myself way hard in Kirsten’s cycle session, the perspiration streaming off the peak of my Headsweats le Tour de France cap.

The diminutive woman in her 60s on the bike beside me is at her first cycle class, no doubt wondering if she’s safe next to a frothing madman, soaked in sweat, moaning and cursing under his breath as he pushes the resistance lever further than ever before.

During the cycle session my heart rate maxes at 164. According to the age-old formula—220 minus age—I shouldn’t get past 161. Five years ago, field testing on a straight stretch of the Melba Highway out near Yarra Glen, I set my high water mark at 176. But this is not a field test.

That’s my next ride. If the rain stops.