Menacing To Look At!

The bike is built, and unfortunately, due to a string of miserable weather and my inability to stomach riding in

Stare too long and this thing will kick you in the shins!

poor weather (years of rain and cold doesn't harden you, it does the opposite), I haven't had a chance to ride the Lector in anger (yet!).  What did I do instead?  Put the Ghost on the Computrainer and pushed through a favorite workout - multiples of 20 minutes at threshold, FUN  (not really).

Having raced for Giant at the peak of my illustrious career, my body has morphed to accommodate the compact geometry of their flagship race bikes.  Love it or hate it, the severely sloping top tube of the TCR line makes for a stout, efficient machine, at the mercy of fit.  It took many months to tweak the cockpit of my first TCR to find a combination of comfort and power.  Moving over to the Ghost, with it's impressively lengthy head tube, I found myself giggling at a whole new level of comfort.  While maintaining its aggressive look with a 'slammed' stem/bar, the seat to bar relationship is in another universe compared to the old race rig.  This can only be good, right?  Opening the chest to allow for deeper breathing, and decreasing the hip angle for better power delivery.  I'll buy that, but can you quantify this cockpit "improvement?"

Let's go back to the aforementioned Computrainer.  Moving closer to race season, the workout du jour includes a standard diet of 20 minute sets.  I've been struggling to push through 3 sets done at a successively higher load (320w > 330w > 340w).  The last set is particularly hard, requiring a very special combination of angry music and razor sharp mental focus (because hey, reality is, hot, crackling bacon is a mere 20 feet away).  The last few workouts were somewhat of a success, pushing to failure at 10 minutes and 12 minutes (of 20) respectively. Here's where it gets interesting.  Swing a leg over the matt (matte?) black machine, settle into a tempo and the first  two sets are banged out with relative ease.  For an old geezer with a new kid and VERY limited saddle time (and even less sleep), 340w comes with profound sweating and a little bit of swearing.  It's hard.  Minutes trickle by, BOOM, 10 minutes pass, now 12, OK, the fun begins.  I've just passed the previous gold standard (12 minutes), and strangely, while operating at about 90%, I'm feeling good. Let's go for 15 minutes and call it a day, setting a new benchmark to wrap the day's session up.  15 minutes rolls by, meh, keep pushing.  16.....17.....18....WHAT?  Can I finish this workout?  DONE! DONE and DONE!  Wowzers.  So maybe it's not the position, and it's the excitement of a new bike (or it is?).  Either way, I'm over the moon to have pushed through the mind-numbing and leg tingling interval, but now I'm even more excited to rail this thing on the roads!!!