Jonathan Vaughters coaching apprecation

"Rule 2: Don’t be self-conscious.
Suffering isn’t pretty. It isn’t meant to be. If you are going about your business of climbing properly, you will be breathing like a water buffalo, sweating like a chain gang, and probably have snot dribbling off your chin. If this is not the case, you aren’t doing this correctly. Over the years I’ve ridden with so many people who are always worrying about breathing too hard in front of their buddy. You’re supposed to be in pain and you’re supposed to be breathing hard, I mean the harder you breath the more o2 you’ll get to your muscles, so let the image thing go, and get down and dirty with the hill. Anyway, if your buddy is two miles behind you, he can’t hear you breathing anymore, can he?"


This rule comes from Jonathan Vaughters Climbing guest blog post here. This NY Times based blog is no Samuel Abt, but it is not bad and the remainder of JV's post is worth your time.
This reminds me of a recent Bicyling magazine article JV was responsible for about how not to train. It was both funny,true, and effective. It may be one of the only good things to appear in bicycling (recently?,ever?). "Ride until You Puke" is pretty much a mandatory workout if you want to get faster. Try it you'll like it.

There is no way around it. If you want to get faster you have to suffer. The slow kind suffering(no food, no beer,losing weight), or the fast kind of suffering(I want to puke, I want to die, I want to stop, etc). Pick your poison, but if you want to have those magic days on the bike, you gotta be ready for a few weeks in the pain cave. JV may be a little to nattily dressed to take seriously(the knot on his tie is usually bigger than his head-he needs to talk to Paul Weller about how to carry a look better), but he has his head on straight when it comes to coaching advice.
Was talking about intervals this morning with Billy. He gets tunnel vision and thinks he pissed himself when he is pushing it. As for me, I get the tunnel vision zone out and then just kind of stop thinking-almost like my brain is just slowwwiinngg down. I want to think, but can't. Don't even ask me my kids names when I'm doing those over/under drills. I usually snap back to reality just as the bile and lactic acid tries to use my throat as launching pad.


PS It took a lot of self-control not to use the infamous and run into the ground wasp-sting swollen face pick, but the guy deserves to be known for something more than that.