How to Hurt Yourself Cycling

Here's one of my favorite ways to hurt myself cycling:

1. Don't ride much for about two weeks. A little jogging is okay, even a day or two of interval training. But you can only ride less than 100 miles each week.
2. At the end of two weeks, mow your grass in 100F heat. Make sure you don't hydrate, and that you're exhausted when you're finished.
3. Plan a ride for the day after you mow the grass. The start temp for the ride has to be at least 80F.
4. On the day of the ride, drink a Coke Zero and eat a breakfast bar. Don't consume too many calories, as you don't want to have much energy for the ride.
5. When you ride from home to your scheduled team ride, really push. Try to hold 20mph into a 10mph headwind. The absolute best day for a ride like this is the last day of the Tour de France. It will make you work harder because you'll be excited about cycling.
6. When you get to the start of the ride and they call out for the "fast" riders to start, go with them, even though there's only 5 in the group. Don't second guess yourself and ride with the big group of intermediates. Remember -- the less people, the more pulling, and pulling is a real key ingredient in the "how to hurt yourself" recipe.
7. As you ride along in the 5 man paceline, don't admit to yourself (or to the paceline) that you can't hold 26mph into the headwind. When one guy drops out, don't even think about dropping back with him. That might reduce some of the hurt. Instead, keep rotating and pulling in the now FOUR man rotation.
8. When you finally finish your first course of hurt and just can't do another turn at the front, you shouldn't drop back and ride 19mph with the 20+ intermediates that are enjoying drafting in a double pace line. Instead, lose the wheel of the rider in front of you, and let them get 50 yards ahead of you. Then let a really strong rider drop back and pick you up. You'll feel challenged to suck wheel back to the other two "fast" riders. It looks easy on TV, but drafting back to the group HURTS, and never forget that you're looking for hurt.
9. Once you're back to the main group, keep struggling through your pulls in the paceline. Eventually, someone will hurt you in an entirely different way, and tell you to sit out a turn because you look exhausted.
10. Lastly, as you near the end of the ride and the sprint to the gas station begins, go ahead and get out of the saddle. Even though you've been living in a world of hurt, there's a wholly different universe of hurt waiting for you in the sprint. What will hurt the most is realizing that there is no way that you can catch the other 3 "fast" riders in the sprint. You won't be on the informal podium. But you will be at the top of the podium of HURT.

Of course, these 10 steps are based on a real series of events that culminated with my Sunday ride. It hurt. It hurt badly. Here's a link to the hurt data.

Let me know if you need any other help with ways to hurt yourself cycling. I've got more.