Breathing, revisited.

Has it seriously been 5 weeks since I've last updated this blog that I used to keep up with every few days?! How time flies when you're having fun... or when you're being a first-year medical student, at least.

I'm days away from debuting what I hope to be a life-altering ride. I call it "The Fear Ride"- I'm doing it for a 75 minute endurance class I teach here in Burlington, this one on Halloween. (I've been toying with it since last April -- fo' real -- and was going to do it as part of my Summer 2008 Theme Scheme, but never finished perfecting it. It's about tapping into your greatest fear/weakness that holds you back, working through and conquering it, and then celebrating your freedom achieved by having shed that fear.) I'll write all about it and how to re-create it -- or a shorter version of it -- for yourself. And, for any of you New Yorkers who will be in town over Thanksgiving when I come back: at the request of some of your fellow riders who got word of this monstrosity of a ride, I'll be doing a 45-minute version of it.

So, that profile will be up at some point in the "Coach Yourself" DIY training corner, as well as a few simple, easily replicable/modifiable cardio profiles.

For now, I'm going to do something that I've never done before on "Spintastic." I'm going to re-post something old. When I wrote this over the summer, as some of you may recall, I slaved over it for hooooooours and then made 3 rides out of it -- parts of which are now key elements of pretty much every ride I ever teach. But now, I've actually dissected all of these things I wrote about (crazy...), and seen them work and break down. When I went back and re-read what I had written, the world made so much sense -- and not just because I now live in a place with air 50000x cleaner than NYC. My first thought, upon leaving the lab at midnight (yes, instead of living on a bike, I live elbow-deep in... use your imagination) was that I wanted to rush home and remind Spintastic readers to BREATHE!

And, so, click here for one of my favorite-ever postings about improving your breathing techniques -- for life both on the bike, and in every realm of your life.