The cost of fun: 2.04 seconds
Saturday I went to Duthie again. This time to ride Gravy Train, an intermediate jump line with 15 or so doubles. It’s hard to get just the rhythm just right on this line. You can easily case jumps or over-shoot them. The trick is to get just the right speed so you get the backside of every jump.
This line was not in Strava so my first run down was setting up the line in my Garmin and carrying a Freelap pole for the finish. Then I did five so runs and called it a day. I know that sounds whimpy but I woke up that morning feeling terrible. Lost my voice and a major cold. Probably shouldn’t be riding but I was so decided not to go overboard.
My runs as timed by Freelap were n/a, 0.50.70, 0.51.25, 0.50.71, and 0.52.75. 2nd and 4th run were good. Lost a pedal in the 3rd run and for the 5th run I decided to not try to race it but just see what it my time would be if I just had fun and enjoyed the jumps. Sometimes relaxing is all it takes to go faster. Not so this time.
Now I did have some trouble setting up the Freelap. I missed the end of my first lap because the Freelap watch did not pick up the signal from the pole when I passed it. And I had to repeat the beginning of the 2nd lap a couple of times until I got the stat pole in the right position.
Imagine my surprise when I got a call from Christopher, the US distributor of Freelap, Sunday afternoon. He had read my previous post and wanted to talk to me about how to setup the Freelap so you are more likely to get all your laps timed.
I had put the poles vertical but Christopher told me to put the poles horizontally and perpendicular to the trail. That way the watch is more likely to pick up the magnetic field.
That is probably why I missed out on a couple of laps the first time I used Freelap and why I had some trouble this second time. Pretty neat to get personal instructions J
And with that we can conclude that timing your runs is fun and that you go faster when you push yourself and just cruising a run will be slower than racing it.
Yup. Going as fast as you can is faster than cruising. That was going to be the end of this post. Le grand finale. The big point. That is until I went riding with Simon Lawton from Fluidride Tuesday evening and told him the story and his reaction was “isn’t it cool how fast cruising is?” I had to ask him to repeat and then explain that to me. And his point was basically the opposite of mine. Two seconds is not a lot considering the difference of effort I put in when trying to go fast.
