Training with my Ears

Don't worry, keep reading and the title will make sense.

Training has been going good. It's weird, triathletes are such a rare breed of people, and then amongst us we are seriously different people. I just heard of one guy who was training for a 16:59:59 finish (17 hour time limit for an Ironman) please compare this to my friend Chad who has to bring an extra water bottle on his Tuesday and Thursday rides to wash his mouth out, because he rides until he pukes.

Ironically, both of these people inspire me, obviously for different reasons. Friends came in-town for the weekend so I did my long workout on Friday. I found this ultra-steep pitch, where I almost fell over going up, it was awesome! I later find out people rock climb up this section of Lookout Mountain.

Yesterday was nasty in all aspects. Around 3:30, when I usually start getting ready to escape the office Chattanooga received 2 inches of rain in about 15 minutes, with 25 mph winds to boot. Strangely enough, as I looked out of my office window, I actually wanted to be out there in it. I know this is perhaps really strange to some of you, and yet to another crows maybe you can relate. I just stared out the window and couldn't help myself in finding the similarities of the weather and my life. So after a couple of minutes of this, I actually shot some emails out to my two hard-core cycling buddies, wanting to get out in the hail storm and mix it up, I promised PBR afterwards to entice them. No response from one, and the other response was "hell yea." When it was actually time to go my "hell yea" buddy was just kidding and wanted to skip the cycling and go straight to the PBR.

So by the time I got out there the storm was pretty much gone, but raining nevertheless. My friend Chad told me about "the big ring workout" where you just stay in your hardest gear for about an hour and half and try to just slam your heart-rate into over-drive. The only rule to this workout is you can't get out of the saddle.

So I'm cruising along, my heart rate isn't even close to where it should be but it's accelerating into the 40 minute mark, when this long straight incline hit. I immediately threw my head down into my aero-bars and started to grind it out. Literally, my face was where my forearms go in my aero-bars. Then the "oh crap" moment happened. My mind was telling my legs to push down, but evidently their was a short in this circuit as my legs weren't moving. I had seen how this movie ends, and it usually ends with somebody getting a concussion from falling over. I had about a solid 1 second to thing about it, so I jerked my head up pushing my arms up, thinking this will be enough to get to the top. As soon as I jerked my head up it felt like God himself reached into my inner-ear ripping my eardrums out. Seriously, I looked down at the street to see if my eardrums were laying out there.

The wire to my headphones had got stuck in my aero-bars and when I raised my head up, my headphones were stationary. I hurt...really, really bad. So after a couple of questionable steep turns on slick roads I headed back and went for a walk with my dog, daughter and wife.

This morning I went for another training ride with my ears and all.