Simplify

One of my favorite movies is “A River Runs Though It”, not only because of all the great fly fishing, but for one scene really. It’s when the father is home schooling his son on how to write. The son is writing some report and is turning it in to his dad for corrections. His father’s corrections are not of the usual type, rather he forces his son to say the same thing in ½ the number of words. He does this 2 or 3 times until his son is able to reduce multiple pages into a single paragraph. A lost art when today’s educational system encourages more words. In that spirit, I simplified my training by getting a PowerTap this year. Sounds counter intuitive doesn't it? I mean one more gadget; one more set of numbers will just complicate an overly complex process already. Yes, and No.
Knowing your power output at various distances is the most accurate way I know of gauging your fitness. If you can’t measure it, it’s not worth doing. I am no physical fitness guru by any means, but I know I spend more energy worrying about my fitness than I do most things. So hopefully this little measurement device will allow me to conserve that energy for something else. It buys me peace of mind, and in reality simplifies my life. I just wish I could get my money back on all the other crap that got me incrementally to this point. Its not unlike buying a GPS after you bought a series of increasingly better compasses and distance measuring devices for hiking. So when I am an old man…uh like next year, I will be able to say, remember when I was a young gun I was able to put out so many watts for 5 minutes.