So many dust bunnies

So that "We've all lost" post about the end of Dirt Rag... mebbe a bit overly dramatic.  Sorry about that.  Mebbe.  It was certainly some hard news to hear, but I'm old enough now to have seen a lot of good things come and go.  Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

I hate the Beatles tho.

If anything, the demise of Dirt Rag has inspired me in some odd way to keep the blerhg alive.  Despite readership numbers being way down compared to the heyday of blerhgs, someone has to keep up the storytelling.  I know there is another magazine still out there regaling us with grandiose tales, but they are usually far flung adventures that are beyond being attainable (logistically, financially, physically, etc) for most of us.  Three ex-pro riders riding across the mountains of Pakistan with a photographer and helicopter support kinda stories.

You won't get those tall tales here.  Achievable and hopefully relatable.  Hopefully.

Now, some house cleaning...

Member when I said I was gonna keep track of ride time and miles in 2020 in an effort to at least know what I'm working with?

I member.

January.

I rode every day except Martin Luther King Day, which woulda been a beautiful day for a ride... life got in the way.  I know riding every day isn't the smartest thing to do.  Whatev.  I also forgot to grab my Wahoo off the kitchen counter on Friday after writing to RIP Dirt Rag post, so I had to do that weird STRAVA thing that let's you just make it up outta thin air?

That's strange.  Wouldn't people be able to pad those numbers they tout about on social medias?

January is a slow month for work.  I'm not doing any extra riding in the morning before my commute.  The only after work ride I'm doing is to Tuesday night trivia.  One might think that Shart Tarck racing might hurt my miles/ride time (because it's "short"), but I get 20-25 miles in, what with the ride to/from and a decent warmup right before the race.

A majority of that ride time is on my tarck bike geared at 48 X 17, which means my feet are always in motion, and I don't really know what that means in the grand scheme of things.

Even tho things are slow right now at my day job, that's eleven plus hours a week in the saddle.  Extrapolating the elevation gain out to the end of year (which is probably a pointless task),  I should break 300,000 feet... which is a lot to some and not to others.

So, there's that.

The mileage doesn't really seem to matter, I guess.  I mean, a slow 18 mile day of work and commuting is not the same as a 18 mile trail ride with a whole lotta mouth breathing, heart pounding effort.  I'll keep mileage in mind, but it's probably not all that important.  A few days off in a month can hurt the daily average (that's how math works), but soft-pedaling the greenway to bump up the numbers seems just as dumb as about anything I can think of right now.

I'm not saying you should hang your hat on any one training concept, but this was a pretty good watch.


Most of the gist of it is that pros aren't out there drilling it most of the time, but when they do, they really, really do.  My takeaway was that my junk miles aren't as junky as I once thought, and some of my junk miles might need to be even junkier. 

And despite having absorbed this knowledge, I'm still not gonna stop doing some things, detrimental or not.  When your favorite past time in the entire world is riding a single speed mountain bike, it's not terribly easy to stay in the "green zone." 

I think that's what he called it anyways.

Fun over "training."  "Training" over apathy... or at least that's what I'm tryna do.

Because I'm not ded yet.