Fitness and P-32

What do fitness and the radioisotope P-32 have in common? P-32 has a half life of 14.3 days. According to Greg Lemond, fitness also has a half life of 14 days.

I tested this theoretical commonality last night at the weekly TNPT.

Greg is right. He might even have been generous.

First, I haven't ridden but a handful of miles in the past two weeks due to scheduling and family and church and all the little things that conspire to get in the way of effective training. In fact, my last TNPT was the night I got shelled at the end of Ruffner Road by the big boys. Of course, that was my own fault.

Last night started off okay. Pretty good in fact. But you can't take two weeks vacation and hang with this crowd. I was fine down Ruffner and once again, halfway up John Rogers. But then the elastic snapped and I had no ability to turn a gear big enough to keep up. I chased back on just before 78, but slipped off the back again climbing up to Old Leeds, never to return. At least I wasn't alone. There were a bunch of us that had trouble last night. The common comment was about how hot it was. So maybe there are some of us that don't do well when the heat index is at 105.

But then we may have been blessed to have gotten spit out the back, as we came upon a full contigent of emergency vehicles responding the crash of one of our number on Shades Creek Parkway coming out of Mountain Brook.

The moral of this story, if you want to hang with the TNPT, you can't afford to take 2 weeks off. Since I've got classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays (one Tuesday on, the next off), I can tell it's going to be tough to keep up. Maybe it's time to look for a slower group for the rest of the year.