Gotta Ride

I've been recently agonizing over whether to do the next TnT cycle event, El Tour de Tucson Century Ride. I had been contemplating signing up for it ever since I finished the Tahoe Century on June 1st. I had mentally decided to take the Winter season off to free up some personal time and get my life back after nearly 5 months of training. I also have set a big goal to participate in the Lavaman Triathlon in April, 2009 which would be my third different training program (marathon, century, triathlon) and would complete my Triple Crown. Training for Lavaman starts in November immediately after the Tucson Century. Training for back seasons would give me essentially no down time.

The plan was to take the season off, take care of some other personal goals, start swimming and possibly running to get a head start on Lavaman training. The last couple of weeks my inner voice has started rationalizing why I should do Tuscon. Something along the lines of:

1) It's for a good cause
2) A lot of your friends are doing it.
3) Fundraising won't be that tough.
4) You are already training on Tuesday nights and doing a long mileage day on the weekend. Looks like Century training to me.
5) Tahoe was an event but Tucson is a race with different medals based on finish time. How fast can you really go .
6) No holding back in a race. You can go all out
7) You can join the High Intensity Training (HIT) subteam and get real training on how to ride fast. Plus they have a really cool looking alternate jersey.
8) You don't have to do every training ride now that your endurance base is already built. Skipping the occasional ride won't risk wrecking your season.
9) It's great exercise.

but it all really boils down to that it will be fun.

The skip a season plan makes perfect intellectual sense but fails in one important point...I gotta ride. There is no denying that I absolutely love cycling. It is totally and completely fun for me.

So today I dropped into the Leaukemia and Lymphoma Society office and signed up for Tucson. First ride is next weekend. Here we go again!