Friday, July 15, 2005

Another day, another yellow jersey

Lance Armstrong is in the lead in the Tour de France! (Okay, so this is a bigger deal to me than to most people.)

The Tour de France is a stage race. Each day, you race your bicycle from point A to point B. That's a stage. Some stages are flat and favor people that can ride with blinding speed and accelerate faster than the other guys at the end. Other stages are hilly and require some strategy, like when to put out your maximum effort to get the biggest gain. Some stages are mountainous, favoring the rider with the highest power to weight ratio (which is usually Lance Armstrong). At the end of all these stages, you add up the total time it took to complete everything, and the lowest time wins.

During any given stage (except the first one), the person with the lowest total time, the race leader, wears a yellow jersey. It's an honor and a burden. But here's the strangest truth about being the race leader, the yellow jersey (yes, the person becomes synonymous with the jersey in bike speak). If you're the yellow jersey, there are stages where you have to shine, to be the best rider out there (like Lance Armstrong is in the mountains), and there are stages where you just have to keep up with the other guys. There are even people you can ignore and let get ahead of you on a given stage because you know they will be no threat to you in the long run. In fact, you can even let one of them be the race leader for awhile, knowing that you will outshine them later and take the lead back. It's a strange sport, but it's a lot more like real life than many others I can think of.

Right now, I'm not on my best game in Body for Life. My real struggle is keeping my diet while working and rehearsing. Also, my workouts have not been as intense as they could be since I'm usually rushing through them, and I haven't had time to do much extra cardio. So, I'm like the yellow jersey at the moment. I'm on a road that doesn't let me show my true strengths, so I'm just "keeping up with the other guys". When this play is over and I have a better situation, I'll be in a better position to let things rip.

The most important feat of the yellow jersey is that he has to race every stage. He doesn't get to sit out the ones he's not good at. In fact, it is often how he handles those stages he doesn't excel at that determines if he wears the jersey again tomorrow.

Speaking of schedules, I must run home and deal with a few things before I go to rehearsal. Allez, Lance, Allez!

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