My friends don't want to ride with me anymore
There was a time, not even too long ago, I had a social life. You know, the life where you occasionally meet other people and talk about things not MTB related. Yes, there are people out there doing that. And then there was the life where you had friends with whom you used to MTB with during the weekend. Perfect—social life and MTB combined. What else can you wish for!
Well, the social life was already over (no time because of training), and now my MTB friends (I won't call names here, Chris) also don't want to ride with me anymore because (quote) "I am following you online, I am not having my butt kicked by some semi-pro." Only to add casually he's also not in the country over the weekend, but yeah, we all know that's just an easy way out 😉.
Finding balance between training and life
Jokes aside, I wanted to share something about the way I try to minimize the impact of my training on the rest of my life (yes, there's still something like that too).
Now that daylight is slowly getting less, and the clock will move back an hour by the end of October, I've found it increasingly difficult to properly plan my trainings (5x a week) around work and family & friends. During summer it wasn't too bad, as you have long days and it's easy to get on the bike for 2 hours, either early in the morning or after dinner. But during the week, flexibility is just less, as work somehow always "gets in the way."
Adapting my training schedule
Initially, I allowed JOIN to plan my training freely, as all of my days were set to be available and it would just plan according to its algorithm. That started to become more difficult with less daylight available, and I found late evening sessions on the Kickr not helping my sleep.
So I changed it to a more fixed schedule, where I have no availability on Monday and Thursday, as that aligns best with both work obligations and private life. JOIN then schedules 5 sessions on the remaining days, of which I've decided to do Tuesday early morning (06:00) and Wednesday evening (19:30) on the Kickr, as it's dark then—and until the Cape Epic, that's how it will be. I find it mentally easier to process that I know for the coming 6 months that I have at least 2 Kickr sessions (plus whatever the weather forces me to move onto it as well), rather than deciding on a day-by-day basis how to train.
Keeping the social element alive
That leaves me with 3 days of riding (Fri, Sat, Sun) on the bike. On Friday I only work a little, and the weekend is just more flexible to plan. For Sundays, I keep my options open to swap or skip the JOIN prescribed training and ride with friends. So far I haven't been "lonely" going through training by myself, but keeping that social aspect of MTB alive is super important - to have a chat on how the ride was, what you did when you hit that bump, how you saw your buddy skidding through the corner. I love that!
Hopefully, Chris changes his mind soon again 😉.
Until then, Keep Chasing!
