Piling On.

I recently added another year to my collection. From what I hear, most people do that on an annual basis. I find the practice counter-productive, and I wish someone would abolish it altogether.
 
Until that point, I keep racking them up. The pile is starting to weigh me down a bit.
 
In my 20s I didn't notice it. I was still the same oblivious kid I was in my teens, and didn't even notice when I started filling out at the latter part of the decade. I could do anything I wanted physically. Unfortunately, I chose not to do anything except eat.
 
In my mid-30s I finally realized I was fat, so the ticking of the clock was offset by shedding of a lot of the excess pounds. I was already feeling old, so as time passed and weight dropped I felt younger.
 
In my early 40s I think I peaked. I had lost about as much weight as my weak will power would sustain, and I had ridden enough to find a comfortable performance plateau. I thought I had the formula figured out. Do X amount of work every year and you'll get to point Y. I forgot about Z, which is the fact that people are not fine wine. We don't get better as we age, we just get stinkier. I have a festering pile of cycling kit in my bedrooms that bears this out.
 
Now I realize that to get to point Y I'm going to have to do X+1. Then X+2. Every year it's going to bump up a bit. Eventually I won't get to Y anymore and settle on V... or U.
 
That's not to say I can't make improvements anymore. I'm nothing if not a collection unfulfilled potential. I'm just too lazy to tap into it. I could lose a lot of weight. A lot of weight. I could only ingest food that yields the maximum amount of energy at exactly the right moment. I could train in the most scientifically advanced ways, using techniques developed to warp the very nature of the time-space continuum. I could travel to exotic locales with temperate climates that would allow me to ride year-round. I could hire Michele Ferrari as my personal coach, and go full US Postal...
  
Nahhh. I'll just stick with point Y for a while. I'm a point Y kinda rider. I'll a little better here or there, worse in other places, and maybe with age I'll get crafty enough that I can hide both from everyone else in the peloton.
  
Anyone want any years? I have plenty of old ones. 

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