No place for hate

There's even a sign at the top of my street that says so, right next to the one declaring my town "Tree City USA" and the other one warning of no on street parking between December 1 and March 30. So it must be true, though you'd never know it from talking to my 80 year old next door neighbor who has lived here all his life. Sort of the Rifleman Flemmi of local agriculture, the guy traps small, furry, vegetable stealing "varmints" in Hav-a-hart traps by night, only to shoot them execution style at sunrise. Two in the head tomato face! I'm neutral with him though, as it's pointless to try to change an old swamp yankee dude, so in return for the free garden tomatoes and driveway snowblowing he bestows upon me, I'm willing to not only ignore his Rambo farming methods, but also humor him by listening to his amusing, yet hate-filled election year rants. And the local skunk and squirrel population seems to be holding its own against great American infidel regardless.

However, this post isn't about politics. It's also not really about my growing fatigue from the wonderful internet turning every debate imaginable into an epic struggle of good versus evil. Which of course includes politics. Cough. So fucking calm down. At least here in cycling land, some of the pundits aren't afraid to note that improvements require getting off your ass, working hard, taking responsibility, and making sacrifices. You didn't hear much of that from either sugar-coated party convention, did you? But hey, it's an election. You can't do anything if you don't end up winning, so whatever it takes to appease the fickle masses. I'm ok with that too. Are you following this? I know it's not quite as confusingly cryptic as Feltslave, or as disjointed as a Gewilli post, but I'm trying. No, this is about cyclocross and running. You see, I'm guilty of planting some of the running seeds in Willi's noggin, so I should squirrel-up and take some of the bullets that are flying about it too.

Let's ignore my lack of coaching credentials for a moment. No, wait, let's not. I don't have any letters or acronyms after my name. I am not pursuing the addition of any letters after my name. I possess a rather inglorious record as a cyclocross racer that spans the last four presidencies. I've never paid a dime for coaching, never raced full-time, and don't even particularly like cyclocross. This year I went sub 30 minutes in a five mile running race, and completed the Boston Prep 16 miler, and I once went home from a cyclocross race on crutches (that was not this year); not only am I unqualified as a coach, I'm biased too! So if you were planning on taking any of this as serious advice on how to become a better, faster, more successful cyclocross racer, then you should probably just stop now. Thinking about it more, and refocusing, this isn't about cyclocross and running, it's about hate. That's where I started, right?

"I hate running."
"I hate weight training."
"I hate _ _ _ _." (take your pick)

Heard or read anything like that lately? As much as I hate (ha!) the seemingly pervasive quest for efficiency in anything and everything we do, emotions in general can be pretty wasteful, but none more so than hate. Don't be a hater. It's inefficient? Instead of worrying about what you hate, or worrying too much about being efficient in training and everything else you do (I'm mean, c'mon, you're reading this shit, you must have some time on your hands), be constructive. At the extreme risk of being "terribly unfair" and unfairly misrepresenting someone else's position, I remember an Adam Myerson quote I read somewhere that has always stuck with me: "Your diet is what you do eat, not what you don't eat." Great advice, and of course the same thing goes for training -- it's what you do do, not what you don't do.

So of course, as even an unqualified coach with a still wildly popular web page parodying the online coaching industry knows, the answer to the "how much running should you do to train for cyclocross" question is the same as virtually every other coaching-related question: It depends. Your training is what you do do, right?

The real question to me is: why wouldn't you run? There are some good reasons. Maybe you have some sort of injury history that makes running an unacceptable risk. Fair enough, but in that case cyclocross might not be such a good idea in the first place. Of course, nobody yet has actually come out and said that cyclocrossers should not run train at all. There is agreement that cyclocross running isn't much like endurance running; it's more like running from the cops, baseball running, or some other sport's running. Track sprinting has been mentioned. Here's the issue for me -- while if you're a former pro cyclist who never had much of a jelly belly, no matter what your jersey says, maybe you can get away with those things even in the absence of base training. Most of the masters' fields though, at least once you go back a few minutes behind the leaders, don't have that kind of athletic pedigree. Furthermore, you don't see many forty year old track sprinters. Even the younger ones suffer acute injuries and get carted off the track in wheelchairs fairly often.



Winning races is great and all, but for me, the biggest goal is to stay in the game. I want to be able to still be doing this stuff in one form or another for at least another few decades. Therefore, the prime directive is DON'T GET INJURED. Running 20-30 miles/week in the winter may not seem consistent with that goal, but it's a lot easier to monitor myself for overuse injury than it is to predict an acute injury that might come up from jumping off my bike at 15 kph wearing plastic cycling shoes, only to subsequently sprint up some frozen, rooted, rutted 20% hill. But we're getting off the course a bit here... Not really though. Cyclocross, regardless of whether the running sections are ten seconds (typical) or two minutes (think UNH in 2006), requires a more well-rounded athlete than bicycle road racing does. Of course it's primarily a BIKE RACE, and I'm the first one to hope it stays that way. I hate don't especially like barriers, dismounts, and remounts. But you have to be a good athlete just to survive, let alone do well. Running is such a basic human function, I'm not sure how you can consider yourself a good athlete if you can't endure a little bit of running.

I feel the same way about gym training. You don't stop in a cyclocross race and do yoga or lift weights either, but many coaches still advise racers to do these things. So just because you never need to run 45 minutes in a cross race doesn't make it a dumb idea in my opinion. If you're sacrificing your bike workouts to run, sure, that's not ideal, especially if you're so serious about this cross shit that you're flying around the country to do it. Perhaps the level of athlete commitment professional coaches see is much different from the pack I run (pun intended) with. I see what they do do, and in most cases the addition of more running should be helping them, not hurting them.

I do cross to train, not train to do cross. So I'm weird. And this is just a blog. Don't hate. One click and and it can be gone forever. Thanks for reading.