A Place I Love to Go

It rained all day. Despite my best plans, any training would have to be indoors. The indoor bike ride; not an appealing thought. What to do? Impulse was to get a movie and just piddle through the ride, nice and easy. Then the arm wrestling contest with oneself. This was supposed to be my long ride day. So how could I just do a “soft and easy” when I am supposed to be doing a long ride day?

OK, OK. I reluctantly decided to do a training dvd. This was a new one that I had never done. And, it didn’t look that hard and even if it was, I could just take it easy on the hard parts. I decided to warm up on the bike for five minutes before I turned the training video on. That felt pretty good. Five minutes came quickly. I didn’t want to stop the warm-up. I didn’t. Finally, after a fifteen minute warm-up, I had made a sort of peace with the indoor biking and felt ready to hit “play.”

It was much harder than I thought it would be. Standing climbs, intervals, tempo intervals; my heart rate was moving higher and higher. I wondered could I hold this? Can I hang on? Somewhere about the middle of the fifty-three minute session, a switch must have got flipped, and I was in. Something had clicked-in in my mind, heart, and body. I had stepped up and stepped past myself. Now I held the higher heart rate, the harder climbs, the higher tempos without feeling on the edge and about to lose grip. I had been counting down the minutes to the end of session but now I was hating to see it end.

This was not my first time to experience this track-switching to a different zone. However, it never fails to thrill me. That is a place I love to go; where limits are transgressed, walls are broken down, and the self extended past perception. And if this all be true, then what else. How far can we hope? Maybe not pushing myself enough is limiting the distance of my hopes. Perhaps, God has it all waiting for us; waiting for use to look beyond the horizon of our perceptions, and in faith believe there is more; in this life and the other.