Sunday, March 2, 2008

Listen To Me

This would be a whole lot easier if Basta would listen to me.

Case in point: His biking career. It's not progressing as I would like. He's improving, yes. I've talked about that here. But he could be doing much more and much better. He really doesn't like the bike and he resists riding hills.

Every week, I schedule him for 2 hours or so of hills, he doesn't do it. He rides the CompuTrainer, which simulates loads of hills, but he really needs to get his butt out there on his bike and ride on real roads with real hills. Whenever he does ride on the road, it's on the routes accessible straight from the house. River trails. Nice, long, traffic-free trails, yes. But flat. The only hills involved are when the path dips under a freeway and then pops up the other side. With enough speed you can coast up that 'hill.' Whoo. Not exactly the hill training he needs.

I know why he's fighting this. The bike is boring. I can sympathize with that. It bores me, too. Hours and hours of sitting there, pumping the legs, thinking about form, always being on the defensive to try to avoid imminent death by traffic . . . No music allowed, too dangerous. No real reward that I can see. Why do people ride bikes such long distances, anyway? I don't know.

Yet, if one is to be a triathlete, as Basta is, one must become good on the bike. No option on that. As his coach, I've been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to get him out there on his bike, riding hills, and enjoying it.

A long time ago I suggested that we ride with one of our triathlon club group rides. He is such a social person I thought riding with a regular group each week would make riding more interesting and make him look forward to it. But Basta said no, he didn't want to do that. Sigh.

I've tried to schedule weekend rides with friends who are fellow triathletes, but that hasn't worked out. Weather, rain or wind, has always made us cancel the ride. Plus, these friends are women. Friends of mine. Fine triathletes with far more triathlon experience than Basta has, but they are slower than he is now. He needs to ride with people that will push him. That's why I can't ride with him. Aside from the, I don't want to aspect, I'd slow him down. We can't have that.

Time is drawing nigh, here. We have less than a month until showtime. (I really need a countdown timer. Anyone know of a quick and easy one to plug in to Blogger?) He needs to ride hills, and he needs to ride them fast. I have been getting more and more insistent about this in his weekly training schedule. He understands that he has been quite remiss on the hills front.

I scheduled him for two hours, canyon ride, this Saturday. As usual.

But verbally, I pressed that he really needed to do it. Something along the lines of, "DO IT!"

"Find me someone to ride with!" He countered. "I'm not going to do 2 hours by myself!"

Okay. I looked up the schedule for the club rides. Sure enough, they still have one, every Saturday. A nice 30 mile hilly loop through the very canyon that I've been recommending all along. "All paces welcome," they said.

So I sent the coordinator an email saying that Basta would be there, printed out the directions to the meeting place, and told him to go.

And he did. I think his reluctance to do so before was because he wasn't very confident in his riding abilities. Now that he's much improved, he can ride with the group and not embarrass himself. So he went.

And he had a blast. He said the course was perfect, the people wonderful, the conversations interesting, and the whole experience very positive. There were about 20 people and they naturally broke into a several different speed groups. He is a very social person and enjoyed chatting with a number of people as they rode.

One of them asked him if he had a coach. He said, "yes, my wife!" Heh.

Afterwards, about 5 of them did a 30 minute run for a nice little brick.

He came back raving about the whole experience. "Schedule me for that every Saturday!" he said. Ok. I will do that.


If only he'd listened to me on that about three months ago. He could have been riding with them every weekend. Ah well. He's there now. I think this will help a great deal. It'll help a bit for Oceanside coming up but it will help much more Vineman.

No comments: