Battling The Tour de Off-Season

Cattaraugus, NY

For many here in the northeast of the U.S, crusty golden leaves have begun to fall, signaling the time of the year when we must take give our a nuts a break off the bicycle saddle and gather other edible nuts for winter.

We are to find out our losses in upper body strength and try to "cross-sport", which must be like "cross-dress" to those 50-50 human beings, you know...to find out what the other exciting side of the grass is like.

After emptying the family budget throughout the year buying bicycles, racing bicycles and driving huge vehicles to buy them and then hauling them around like a Bedouin to race them all over the place, we are going to try new things, lust after new gear, and bring the family budget to negative on the number line.

We're going to spend night in and night out of Ebay worse than a prostitute in a red light district of Bangkok, bidding on this crankset and those wheelsets and that headset because our well, our headset up there on the shoulder is a little out of torque, we're not satisfied with what we have and think we could be faster with the fancy colored ceramic bearings originally designed for machines that churn out raw materials for society in excess of 20,000 rpm. Nope, we must have it.

Not to mention, such night sessions of Ebaying will take a toll on us as we gain weight each day by the pound.

Sometime later, we'll start the "training" again and buy loads of cycling books to read because turns out, none of us know zilch about mambo-jumbo like periodization and TSS and FTP and BSS and all that BS.

When the training kicks in, it comes in myriad forms like wind trainers and rollers and fancy virtual reality and scandalous indoor spinning classes. For those of us who can't afford any of the above, we'll just pretend to spin a high gear in the bathroom while showering and then do calf raises after that, and somehow get the impression those legs will get big in the hot water over a couple of months. You know, the air-cycling version of air-guitaring.

Oh and must I say, half the training mentioned above will be consumed in trying to get rid of the weight we put on in winter. The other half lands us precisely to the fitness level we started out last year. And then we walk proud and upright with an S-curve in the back thinking we are stronger cyclists. Note : This is not applicable to those of who air-cycled in the bathroom as most of them will slip and fall on their bottoms in soapy water anyway.

The final stage of this Tour de off-season comes when renewing races licenses and buying extra licenses and so on, just in case one got lost, voila, not to fear here's another one in my organizer. Cat 1, cat 2, cat 3...what's that mate...is that a part of the cat family? Do they snarl?

When all is said and done, its a great off-season and its the journey that matters, yeah?

By the way, why the heck do they even call it off-season? There's nothing off about this silly affair.

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Happy Halloween and yes, have a great....off season !!!