It’s tax season, and sosovelo has decided to do what everyone else in the America does: invent tax loopholes to completely skirt social responsibility! This year, we’re gonna make like Elron Ubbard and talk a bunch of ballyhoo about life-forces and volcanoes, then tie the whole shebang back to bicycling before we wrap it up and call it a religion. So that we NEVER AGAIN have use pay taxes or spend our hard earned money on any of those bullshit roads or firetrucks or other public services.

Today’s sermon? Faith Based Training.

It seems like athletes today are putting far too much of their training energy into fads like “hard work” and “weight training”, and these efforts are just as worthless as those muscle-generating electrode things that I bought from an infomercial. I’ve been reading about this training stuff for years, and it sounds exhausting. You know who didn’t weight train? Jesus. And look at his abs.

See, I don’t now how those magic boxes on your handlebars work, with their weird devil numbers. “Energy” and “calories” sound like sin words to me, and our deities don’t appreciate new technology. Gods are curmudgeonly, and they hate Powertaps for the same reason that I hate Twitter: we just don’t understand them.

So rather than burn my bridge to the afterlife by using heathen tools, I’m going to just keep telling myself that God has a plan for my racing season (the same way God has a plan for all of those kids with chastity rings and no understanding of the different forms of contraception). People eschew science for faith all the time, and they only occasionally die of very treatable illnesses. I see no reason that I shouldn’t apply the same favorable odds to bike racing. If I’m wrong, I’ll still be slow. But if I’m right, I’m going to climb like the Schleck brothers and have a six pack like the son of God. If I pick my higher power right, I might even get a spaceship and a bunch of virgins that look like Katie Holmes.

This is how religion works, right? Buffet style?

But I want to be clear. This isn’t one of those half-faith things, like those people in Oregon City who refuse to give their kids antibiotics but still take them to the dentist because they believe God can’t do fillings. No, I’ve got 100% unwavering George Michael-style “Fai-fa-fai-fa-FAITH (baybaaay)”… I am totally committed to doing jack shit this pre-season.

Give a man a dumbbell, and he’ll be healthy until he stops lifting it. But MAKE a man a dumbbell, and he’ll be healthy forever. Unless he dies of a illness treatable by anything other than fertility or sexual performance enhancing drugs. And if that happens, his friends and family will most likely say that he didn’t believe hard enough or that it was all part of God’s will to test us.

In conclusion, TOO SOON!