My comment last Thursday that I'm not in good form got me wondering just how bad my fitness is these days. So far this year I've accumulated a couple of notable failures, the first being not getting to the top of Browns Peak in April and the second being failing the Hour Challenge on the 2012 LMI course with prolific JEC commenter and super-running-streaker Bobby et al. But just how out of shape am I?
Yesterday I sought to answer that question with my litmus test for fitness here in Phoenix: the South Mountain time trial. It's a 1200ft climb up the smooth asphalt of San Juan and Summit Roads through a Sonoran landscape to the mass of TV towers that adorn the United States' biggest city park.
There's an official South Mountain time trial race that takes place every year in May. I've never done it; every year I've either been out of town or too uncaring. But from what I hear, it's a well run event that doesn't cost much and is a lot of fun. It's also a short course. It starts at the turn-off onto Summit Rd and finishes at the top. My SoMo time trial starts at the bathrooms a mile-and-a-half further down San Juan, which adds five minutes of a rolling climb to the course.
Yesterday, by relying on the previous weekend's three-night stay in high-elevation Colorado along with a few hard rides to and from work during the workweek that followed, I mustered all my available strength and finished SoMo in 28:13. That's a good time for me. It's probably in my all-time top ten.
Though at first I was happy with that result and optimistically concluded I'm not in bad form, a sober night's rest—metaphorically, not literally—got me thinking otherwise. That is, I am in bad form, but my performance was comparably good because bad form makes me work harder. Whereas, when in good form, I've got the hustle of a pro baseball player who just signed an eight-year deal.
Yesterday I biked up South Mountain with my heart in my throat, beating about 180 times a minute until the end, where SoMo cruelly has its steepest grades and my heart rate spiked higher than what's theoretically possible, as according to the (obsolete) heuristic that one's max heart rate is 220 minus age. For as long as I've had an HR monitor, I've never sustained as high a heart rate for as long a time while on the bike; my usual half-hour all-out effort heart rate is in the range of 170-175bpm.
So now I'm not sure what to think, but it goes something along the lines of: who cares?
