Attack on the flats...

Yes, it's another bike racing story. The year was 1987. American Greg Lemond, probably the strongest cyclist with the strongest team in pro cycling at that time, had been in a hunting accident in the off-season and was not racing the Tour de France. That left a huge opportunity for someone lesser known to step in and take the race. This person turned out to be Irishman Stephen Roche. Roche was a great cyclist, but he was missing one component for winning the tour and that was the ability to win in the mountains. Well, he was leading the race in the early flat stages, but most experts predicted that he would probably give up the overall lead in the very first mountain stage.

But he did a most unexpected thing, something so crazy that no one saw it coming. You see, in the mountain stages, there are always a few flat sections. Quite often, the big climbs are at the end of the stage. Most riders don't push the pace too much on these flat sections since the climbs require so much energy. Since the biggest time gains can be achieved during the climb, everyone tends to concectrate their efforts there. In the first big mountain stage, Roche did the opposite. He attacked on the flats before the climb. Most of the other riders didn't follow him since they were trying to conserve energy. By the time they realized he wasn't just toying with them, he had a huge lead. So, all his rivals suddenly had to race like crazy just to get close enough to him to catch him on the mountain climb. Because of all the energy they used up in the chase, most of them were unable to climb at their best potential. Although several of them did catch him (he was pretty well spent from his efforts in the flats), no one was able to overtake him for the overall lead. The big climbers never did recover from that day and Roche was able to hang on to his lead and win the overall category.

On the bike yesterday, that was what I was thinking about when I started. I decided to go hard and fast right from the getgo. I was at sprinting speed through the first few minutes and managed to maintain it even at the higher resistance levels. I actually managed to get my heart rate over 160 a couple of times. It was a great workout, if I do say so myself!

We decided not to do our pictures on Sunday. We both had too much to do, plus it was Father's Day and I wanted to visit my parents. We have three days from the end of the Challenge to get the pictures done, so we are doing them on Thursday. That should be a little less stressful than trying to cram them in between other obligations.

I seem to have lost another couple of pounds last week, bringing my actual weight loss very close to 13 pounds. Keep in mind that I started the challenge after just having lost five pounds because of the flu, so since about fourteen weeks ago, I've lost something close to eighteen pounds! I would have liked to gain more muscle, but I'm not complaining. I'm very happy with my results. I'm going to take some final measurements today. I'm a little behind on putting them on the web site, but a complete wrap up of all our results will probably be there sometime early next week. I'm going to trim down the number of pictures since several people have complained that they take forever to load.

Today is the last day of the challenge, and it's an off day. I feel good about being done, but I don't really feel like I've finished yet. First of all, there are the pictures to be taken. Then there's the fact that I haven't met all my goals yet. Then there's the fact that I always intended to do this challenge twice in a row, so I have the next one to plan and begin. And then there's the fact that I know from past experience that I need to keep working just to maintain my muscle gains. They don't seem to last long with me if I let them go for any length of time. So, I'll probably be doing resistance training the rest of my life. So this really is just the beginning.

Hey, isn't there something about that in the title of this blog?!?