Tough Day and Critical Thinking

Paid my dues today for the hard tempo ride yesterday. Body was just tired...of course it could mean I need more sleep. But the legs didn't have the zap they had yesterday. The good and bads of cycling I guess. Some days you have no chain other days, you are begging for mercy as little kids pass you on their way to school. The former the truth, the latter...maybe but I'm not revealing everything.

The plan for today was to get in a mix of 1min V02 efforts. I scoped a climb from my ride yesterday that I thought would be perfect as the race on Monday has some steep, short climbs in the race. Now I'm not going to become an über sprinter over steep climbs in one week, but everything is all about building for the future. It will also be good to get some sensations in the legs that I might, or rather WILL DEFINITELY experience on Monday. From the looks of the climbs I knew it would be steep, 15-20% steep. I'll admit, I was a little scared before starting lol. So the workout would go like this, go as hard as you can for 1min/recover on the descent for 1min, repeat 5 times. Total interval time of 10min give or take. I ended up making the max efforts longer b/c I wanted to ride up to the bench that was my marker. So like 1.15min-1.26min. By the 5th one, I actually rode a higher power and felt surprisingly better. I did definitely bury myself on it b/c I knew that I would have recovery afterwards. But it was good to go harder on the last one, means I have some endurance I guess. Afterwards, I limped down the hill and road at a pretty mellow recovery pace up the Necker towards Freiburg a.M Necker. Then bolted over the bridge and saw a sign for Ludwigsburg. I'm kind of liking this signage thing. Of course you have to be a little adventurous b/c sometimes the signs don't always appear in sequential order. But one must get the Leif Erickson on and brave the frontier. Ended up riding down to Ludwigsburg and caught the river path and then back to Marbach a.M. Necker. From Marbach, I rode back to Murr then did a 2nd set of 1min max/1min recovery efforts. I was pretty spent by the last one. V02 intervals will do that. Looking back I should have done this yesterday b/c I was so fresh. Always better to do your hardest work when you are feeling well so you get the most benefit. But in racing you don't always feel super good so working hard when it hurts extra builds mental toughness. So I got that going for me. Found some new routes so that was pretty cool too. While on the bike I had a revelation...Today was the first day that I feel that I am actually learning the local area. Every ride before was a adventure, some might call a gamble. B/c I didn't always know where I was going or if I could safely make it back. But my Jedi mapping skills have sorted me out well enough. But today, I could finally say how to get here, here, or there with the best route for cycling and some choice sections for training. Tomorrow, I'm going to do an endurance ride of 4hrs with some power accelerations. Afterwards, I heading to the Flughauf to pick up Marc and Heinz.

Now onto the 2nd component of today's enlightment. My critical thoughts on Performance Evalutions and Job Ratings. First off, I despise them like the gum on your shoe or the dung on the sidewalk. Why? Because they are a waste of time, and never accurately represent the person involved. When I worked for Bank of America long, long ago as a trading desk support staff, I was greeted by this bs program known as Six Sigma, a brain child of GE engineers. I spent days and days filling out my 6 areas and creating metrics for the next year that I would be graded on. I believe that goal setting and discussion is important, I do it every day. But the way Six Sigma works is an economic drain. Fortunately, I left Bank of America for a better position and didn't have to follow through on the my yearly goals. For the record, of the 6, I only cared about 2, the other 4 were for filling in the blanks. Now is that not a drain of talent? In my next job as an economic analyst for a I-Bank, I got the pleasure of being thrown under the gauntlet by my boss in the firm's proprietary evaluation system. Now my boss and I saw eye-to-eye in similar fashion as to how a vegan sees with a normal, every day German. Not so good if you missed any culture reference. I received a pretty low score from her. So this brings me to my complaint after my long KWesq background =) If one is doing there job, ie tasks are being completed, projects are running smoothly, they aren't causing strife, what does an Evaluation do? Besides waste time for the evaluee and the evaluator. Your work should speak for itself whether you are good worker. If a cyclist wins every one of their targeted races, do you need to ask did they have a good year? Well, you can certainly look at things they improved upon and make suggestions for next year but by winning those key targets, didn't they just evaluate themselves and their hard work? Yes. You can never entirely capture someones efforts or skills from a written test or evaluation. We always look at the most recent rather than the entire picture. Winning one day but riding crap the rest of the year may be important to some, but not to me.

Now you have been enlightened with my critical thoughts of job evaluations.

Chow,
Matthew