LOTR ride...

Frodo and Sam, about to start the hardest part of their
journey...like me, warming up on the bike, about to start the
hardest part of the workout.

Joy here...Okay, I came out of the proverbial closet as a Lord of the Rings fan on one of my most recent blog entries (and given that I also outed myself as a Song of Ice and Fire nerd, it's fair to say I have dorky fantasy movie/book tastes).  Beyond the special effects, imaginative landscape, and epic scale of some of the greatest imaginative fantasy work of this era, what makes these kinds of stories appeal to me has something to do with archetypal narrative arcs.  Critics like Frazer and Frye popularized the Jungian notion that human experiences--especially narrativized experiences--can be understood in terms of shared, powerful archetypes.

A typical narrative archetype is the journey or quest where, of course, a hero must triumph over adversity, and so on Friday morning when I hopped on my bike on the indoor trainer and turned on my Lord of the Rings DVD to pick up where I left off the other day, I channelled my inner archetypal hero.  I started off feeling unsure, my legs heavy and tired from Wednesday's running workout, not knowing if I'd be able to work through the 15sec. accelerations as planned.  Full of optimism I worked through the warm up drills as outlined for me by Coach Andrew, slowly but surely feeling my legs loosen up...and then it was time for the accelerations...

Pretty much how I felt as I huffed and puffed my way
through my four accelerations.

...2 seated accelerations followed by 2 standing accelerations...

I was grimacing, feeling the pain build up in my legs...ack, am I going to be able to finish?...as I was getting ready to give up and throw in the towel, admit defeat as the end of my quest and realize that sometimes you just don't triumph over adversity but rather get your butt good and kicked by adversity, I suddenly realized that I had knocked off yet another workout and was into my cooldown phase.

And when Coach Andrew looked at my data from this LOTR ride (where I, of course, cast myself as the hero), he said:  "Your wattage is up from when you did this workout earlier, so great that the form is improving," which means that I'm on the right track...as Bilbo says:  "You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."  I just don't know where this journey on the bike will take me, but I'm set on my path...I've stepped out onto my proverbial road.

Over and out,
Joy

Ride Stats:

-10 minute warm up
-3 minutes easy
-5 minutes of ME (moderate)
-2 sets of 40 seconds of super-high cadence (140rpm)
-5 minutes of SE (steady endurance)
-2 seated accelerations (15 secs)
-2 standing accelerations (15 secs)
-2 minutes of high cadence, easy spinning