This chapter was cut from the $17 book The Journey Back to keep the book tight. The full framework is at secure.metabolicclaritylabs.com.
I did not begin thinking like a cyclist until after the crash.
Before the crash, I thought riding a bicycle meant discovering how fast and how far I could go.
I would climb onto the Cannondale, reach the greenway, press the pedals, and begin testing the machine and myself.
How fast can I go?
How long can I hold it?
How far can I ride before work?
Can I beat what I did last time?
The bicycle made those questions almost irresistible.
The CAAD9 is responsive. When I press harder, it accelerates. When the road tilts downward, it can become much faster than the bicycles I grew up riding. I recorded a maximum speed of approximately 27.8 miles per hour on a descent near Freedom Park.
That speed and the crash must remain separate.
I was not traveling 27.8 miles per hour when I went down.
My current estimate is that I may have been moving around ten miles per hour, although that number is only a recollection and should not be treated as activity data. The problem was that I was accelerating into a corner, carrying more speed than I could manage through the available line, and then ran the narrow tire into the groove at the edge of the pavement.
The fastest moment on the bicycle did not injure me.
The moment when speed, attention, skill, and road position stopped matching did.
That distinction became the beginning of real training.
After the crash, Alex and I went to 2nd & Charles in the Charlotte area.
I walked into the store with the same approach I bring to a new market or a mechanical problem.
I was going to understand this.
I bought nearly every bicycle or triathlon book they had that appeared relevant.
I had already learned what happened when enthusiasm outran knowledge.
Now I wanted the vocabulary, the systems, and the reasons behind the way experienced athletes trained.
I started reading.
At first, some of the advice seemed almost backward.
Ride slowly.
Run slowly.
Include harder efforts, but do not make every session hard.
Build a base.
Recover.
Repeat.
Why would somebody trying to become faster deliberately spend so much time moving slower?
That question exposed how I had approached almost everything in life.
I have always respected intensity.
When I built marketing campaigns, I could work longer than other people. When a problem appeared, I stayed with it. When somebody else reached the point where they were ready to stop, I often treated that as the point where the real work began.
That characteristic helped build my career.
I brought the same operating system to endurance training.
If a hard effort produced a benefit, then the hardest effort should produce the greatest benefit.
If going fast was the goal, then every ride should be fast.
If a twenty-mile ride proved something, then the next ride should prove more.
The logic sounded disciplined.
It ignored adaptation.
Living in fast forward might make a good Kenny Chesney song.
It makes a poor training plan.
A human body cannot be trained like a marketing emergency.
It does not become stronger only during the moment of maximum effort. The training session creates a demand. Sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, and time help determine how the body responds to that demand.
Apply too little stress and the signal may not be strong enough to produce the change I want.
Apply too much stress too often and I may accumulate fatigue, lose consistency, or become injured.
The answer is not always harder.
The answer is the amount of stress I can absorb, recover from, and repeat.
Once that clicked, slow training stopped looking like weakness.
It began looking like strategy.
I also began collecting better information.
I found a small bicycle computer on eBay for approximately thirty-five dollars.
I added a sensor to the bicycle that could report cadence.
Cadence was a new way of thinking for me.
Before, I noticed speed.
Cadence asked how quickly I was turning the pedals.
Those are not the same measurement.
A rider can travel faster downhill with less effort because gravity is contributing. A headwind can slow the bicycle even while the rider works harder. Hills, wind, surface, tires, traffic, turns, and route all affect speed.
A speed number alone cannot tell me what training demand my body experienced.
The cadence sensor added one piece.
My COROS PACE 3 added heart rate and the ability to review a session over time.
Strava on my phone gave me another record of the route, distance, speed, and repeated efforts.
Together, the devices created a dashboard.
Distance told me how much ground I covered.
Time told me how long I worked.
Speed described movement across the road.
Cadence described how quickly I turned the pedals.
Heart rate offered an imperfect view of the internal demand.
The route explained the hills, turns, interruptions, and surface.
My own perception told me whether the effort felt easy, controlled, difficult, frightening, or unsustainable.
No single number was the ride.
That was the same lesson I had learned with diabetes.
A glucose reading mattered.
It did not tell the entire story.
The same breakfast could produce different results after different sleep, stress, activity, medication timing, or circumstances. I could not look at one glucose value and pretend it explained every input acting on the body.
Likewise, I could not look at one maximum speed and conclude that I had completed a superior training session.
Twenty-seven-point-eight miles per hour might be the most exciting number on the screen.
It might reflect a hill more than fitness.
The number that flatters me is not automatically the number that teaches me.
That realization connected the bicycle to the Four Loads.
In both situations, measurement without context could create a false conclusion.
If glucose increased after a meal, food was one input, but sleep, stress, movement, medication, and timing might also belong in the explanation.
If bicycle speed increased, stronger legs were one possibility, but a descent, tailwind, route, or traffic pattern might belong in that explanation too.
Data did not remove judgment.
It demanded better judgment.
That is why I would refine the statement ‘training is about data.’
Training is not the data.
Training is the process the data helps me understand.
The devices do not pedal.
They do not recover.
They do not decide whether today should be easy, hard, or off.
They cannot feel the difference between fear left over from the crash and pain that signals a new injury.
They create feedback.
I still have to interpret it.
That requires the same skills I needed after the diabetes diagnosis.
Focus.
Dedication.
Consistency.
The willingness to make mistakes.
The humility to make adjustments.
And the discipline to repeat what works without demanding that every day feel impressive.
Focus means knowing what I am training today.
Am I building an aerobic base?
Am I practicing cadence?
Am I learning to handle the bike smoothly?
Am I completing a harder interval that belongs inside a larger plan?
Or am I simply chasing the emotional reward of seeing a larger speed number?
Dedication means returning when the novelty is gone.
Anybody can become excited about a pink-taped Cannondale on a beautiful morning.
Dedication appears when the workout is controlled, repetitive, and not worth posting on social media.
Consistency means the plan has to survive more than one heroic day.
A ride that leaves me too injured or exhausted to train again is not automatically better because it looked impressive while it happened.
Mistakes are unavoidable.
The crash was a mistake.
Trying to ride every session as hard as possible was a mistake.
Believing maximum speed equaled maximum progress was a mistake.
The value of a mistake depends on whether I use the information.
Adjustment means changing the next decision.
Enter the corner more slowly.
Leave margin at the edge of the pavement.
Complete an easy ride without turning it into a race halfway through.
Pay attention to cadence, heart rate, duration, and feel instead of allowing speed to dominate the dashboard.
Take the recovery day when the plan or the body requires it.
Discipline is what holds all of those pieces together.
I used to define discipline as the ability to force more effort.
Now I am learning that discipline can mean refusing to turn an easy day into a hard day merely because hard feels more legitimate.
That is much harder for my personality.
When I see an open stretch of road, I want to press the pedals.
When the Cannondale responds, I want to press harder.
When the speed rises, I want to know how high it can go.
The bicycle rewards impatience immediately.
Training rewards patience later.
That may be the cleanest difference between riding for excitement and training for an event.
A recreational ride can be valuable because it is fun. I do not need to convert every mile into a scientific project.
But when I call a session training, it should serve the athlete I intend to become.
The purpose is not to win the workout.
The purpose is to become more prepared for the race.
That is how the books changed me.
They gave names to ideas I had previously treated as contradictions.
Slow work could build future speed.
Recovery could support progress.
Different sessions could have different purposes.
A controlled ride could be successful even if Strava contained no exciting personal record.
An athlete could finish with more capacity available and still have completed exactly the intended workout.
The same change happened in my food experiments.
Early on, I wanted every glucose measurement to give me a clear yes or no.
This food is good.
That food is bad.
Then I learned that a result belonged inside a system.
I needed repeated observations. I needed sleep and stress context. I needed medication timing, movement, portions, and the larger pattern.
The glucose meter did not hand me wisdom.
It handed me a number.
Wisdom came from learning what the number could and could not mean.
The bicycle computer operates the same way.
It can display speed to a decimal place.
Precision does not automatically create understanding.
I can be precisely wrong about why the number changed.
That is where my engineering background becomes useful.
A measurement is only as useful as the question attached to it.
If the question is, ‘What was my maximum speed?’ the device can answer.
If the question is, ‘Did this ride improve my ability to complete a sprint triathlon?’ maximum speed alone is inadequate.
I need the purpose of the session, the duration, intensity, recovery, repeated response, and what happens during the following workouts.
One fast ride is an event.
A sequence of purposeful rides is training.
That is also why I stopped seeing the triathlon as three dramatic performances.
The race is one swim, one bicycle segment, and one run.
Preparing for it is hundreds of ordinary decisions.
Go slowly when slow is assigned.
Go harder when the plan calls for intensity and the body is ready.
Recover when recovery is needed.
Learn the skill instead of trying to purchase the appearance of skill.
Review the feedback.
Adjust.
Return.
That process is less exciting than living in fast forward.
It is also far more likely to carry me somewhere meaningful.
The books, sensors, watch, bike computer, and apps did not turn me into an endurance athlete.
They helped expose where enthusiasm had been impersonating training.
The athlete still has to make the decision.
I can buy every book at 2nd & Charles.
I can attach sensors to the bicycle.
I can wear the COROS and record the ride on Strava.
None of it matters if I ignore the lesson and attack every corner as if today’s maximum speed were the entire purpose.
The crash interrupted the fast-forward version of my comeback.
The education that followed gave the journey a pace I might be able to sustain.
That is what cycling and diabetes now share in my mind.
Neither is managed by one perfect decision.
Both require attention to inputs and outputs.
Both require repeated measurements without worshiping the measurement.
Both require accepting that the same action can produce a different result under different conditions.
Both require mistakes that become knowledge instead of shame.
Both require adjustments.
And both depend on the discipline to continue after the first burst of fear and motivation disappears.
Speed can make one ride memorable.
Consistency is what builds the rider.
Data can describe what happened.
Discipline changes what happens next.
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Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.