Junior year Trigonometry and I warred from August to November.

We both stood our ground unrelentingly, but by October - the darkest month of the war - I started to doubt. I started to think there was perhaps something wrong with me because the numbers were infallible. After all, they were numbers, whole or not whole an irrelevant factor in defining their perfection. It couldn't be their fault we couldn't live in peace, it had to be a weakness of mine - or so I came to believe after so many months of the struggle.

Every morning at 9:07 the battle would begin, and for an hour equations would crossfire over that flat, green plane. For an hour chalk would fly and pencil points would be broken off in the bodies of algorithms, but there was never any ground gained by either of us. Trigonometry fought to be understood and I fought to understand it, we both had the same goal, yet were pitted, somehow, against each other. For months.

Then one day we laid down our weapons, I suppose we were both tired of the nonsense. Whatever the reason however, the war ended the week before Christmas break, and after the holiday we met yet again on that smooth, green, but powdered field, only this time as allies in the great and historic Senior Calculus prep endeavor of 1991.

I don't know if this is when my love/hate relationship with numbers began, but to their credit I've only found myself hating, and on occasion fearing them when I've asked of them more than I should have; when I've asked them to define me, to tell me something about myself they were never designed to measure, or more definitively, when I've failed to see them simply for what they were. This is how I remember Trigonometry; one day I simply just started seeing numbers instead of masked sine and cosine monsters. And then I had nothing to fear, nothing to fight, and nothing to doubt.

Like then, I don't know how it happened or why it happened now, I only know that this week I finally just saw numbers. It finally made sense. Simple calculations that can only tell me where I am, how far I've come, and how far I have yet to go. The rest is up to me. I thought I'd won the war before, but there was never a war to win. Only peace to be made. Now it's simple.

60 avg cadence + X amount of work = 90 avg ideal cadence.
172 avg power + X amount of work = 190 avg ideal power.
145lbs - X = 135 ideal race weight.

Solve for X.

Heh. I got an "A" in Algebra.

Who's ready to come with me to Ironman?