The Dangers of Chasing

I'm not talking here about chasing down the leaders in a bike race as that can be a good thing.

The chasing I'm talking about here is the chasing of goals. A good example of what I mean is what can happen if you are cycle training without a powermeter but do have a heart rate monitor and are doing high intensity intervals. Since HR lags effort by a fair amount, you generally go out too hard in order to get your HR quickly into the zone you want and then have to ease up as your HR zooms up and out of the desired range. Quite often you'll ease up too much and your HR drops down out of the desired range and you end up repeating the cycle. On longer intervals you will likely eventually get zeroed in, but on short intervals you can just bounce around and not really get the workout you are trying for. The key is to learn what the right effort feels like and build up to it, rather than chase the number on the monitor.

I'm dealing with a similar "chasing" problem in my weight loss goal. Even though I said yesterday that I don't care too much about day to day weight, it does on some level bother me when it goes up or even just doesn't go down on consecutive days, which is what has happened the past 2 days. I now need to fight the urge to cut calories even more (I'm already working at -1000 calories per day [give or take]) even though another couple hundred per day wouldn't have that big an impact. But the urge is there since my logical brain says "well, if we didn't lose we must be eating too much, so eat less". If I give in and "chase" my weight, then I'm almost certain to lose too fast and cause other problems down the line.

Training today went well. I rode the same route as Monday, but managed it a bit faster, about 30 seconds over 74 minutes. Would have been even better if I hadn't had to walk my bike for about 30 seconds to keep it between me and a couple dogs who came out to bark at me. They didn't come out into the road, thankfully, but they did get my adrenalin going. Of course, it was on a climb where at this point they would have caught me easy.

Regards.