Intelligent Measures

If you are a mountain biker living in the midst of Germany, October happens to be the last call for good weather. Cold weather prevails over the entire winter, dark days are accompanied mostly by rain, later by snow. These nasty conditions almost kill one‘s motivation to step outside, they even make it more challenging to utilize the outdoors for training purposes.

Even with particular gear, setting out for a long ride at rain has been a severe challenge for me. After deciding to go solo for the 24 hours of Duisburg Mountain Bike Race in August next year, I knew that my normal training workload will never be sufficient to survive a 24-hour bike race. I would need more time to ride.

I am working regular office hours, that is from 8 to 6 daily, but my wife and I are up very early as all of our 3 kids are attending the high school, and at least one of them has to be driven to school every day. Last year, I opted for mtb-commuting to the office, which had been an unexpected hastle of a different kind, despite the new and close location of our new office. A direct commute would take around 15 to 30 minutes depending on the route I choose, which is quite a trade-off for a decent training session. It hasn‘t been fun either, as I needed to dress up in casual clothes after getting totally warmed up on the trail. I couldn‘t even finish two complete chapters of an audiobook before arriving at the office.

Desperately seeeking for a solution, I decided to ask my family and my fellow co-workers, if I could utilize lunch breaks for the preparation and asked even for an extension thereof, so that I get a daily allotment of at least 2 hours of training time. They said yes and I registered for the event. 

It has been a home run since then.

The downside of abusing the daily commutes for a mountain bike training is, that you have to carry everything with you, from your laptop to your personal stuff and even the fresh clothes you had in mind to wear for that particular day. This makes up to 6-8 kilos filling your backpack depending on your schedule. Not only can you not ride as aggresively as you wish, as riding in the slippery woods proves to be a very risky undertaking with small crashes occuring repeatedly, but also and thus most importantly, you choose uninspiring routes to minimize this risk, which makes the ride dull, even boring.

On the contrary, lunch rides have become great fun. 

I am usually done with my work before the ride starts, so I can relax and enjoy my ride. Our office lies in the middle of a mountain biking region with some great local trails directly at our doorstep, which provides instant pay off, if you just want to go out and play. 

And I saved the best part for last: I am absolutely free to choose whenever I want to take my lunch break! So, if it rains in the morning, I‘ll take a late lunch break and ride in the afternoon; and if, on the contrary, anytime the weather is nice, off I go! Oh, and if it rains all day, as it frequently does in November, there‘s still the gym a few minutes away. Last exit, so to speak.

This has been working very nicely for me for two weeks now and I hope it stays this way. BTW, my Garmin GPS just displayed today‘s sunset time: 4:38 PM! Can you believe it? Dark times require intelligent measures and this is definitely not rocket science.

Ride on.