I hate the metric system!

It was too good to be true. Really, it was. And I should've known better.

I hopped on my bike to work on my cycling trainer for a while tonight and almost immediately I was amazed by how easy everything felt. I was pedaling very comfortably and maintaining a good pace. Too good.

Could it be that all of my training in recent weeks -- the increase in my running intensity, my consistently grueling trainer sessions -- was finally paying off? Paying off in the form of much-improved conditioning that suddenly made my cycling trainer work seem unexpectedly easy?

Heck no.

I was about 8 minutes into my trainer session when I forced myself to do a reality check. I mean, I was pedaling away at more than 20 mph with minimal perceived effort. Or so I thought.

Closer inspection of my bike computer revealed that when I increased my cadence ever so slightly I wasn't clicking away at a brisk 25.4 mph clip. Instead, I was going 25.4 kilometers -- %$#*&@! KILOMETERS -- per hour.

Bloody metric system. I was suspicious of it even as a wide-eyed lad in grade school when my teachers insisted that we learn the system -- replete with the useless deci- and deca- prefixes I've never heard used, even now, some 30 years later -- because someday in the not-too-distant future "everyone in the world will use the metric system." What kind of Kool-Aid were they drinking? Were they expecting Canadians, armed with meter sticks, to violently storm across the border and forcefully install their units of measurement upon the staunchly old-school US of A?

I was crestfallen -- because of my workout, not America's failure to follow through on the once seemingly imminent transition to the metric system. Crushed.

I wasn't suddenly in better condition. I wasn't enjoying some sort of miraculous improvement in training. I was slacking.

That 25.4 reading I discovered to be gauged in kph? That translates to a rather pedestrian 15.78 mph. That's slower than my average mph for a workout. Considerably slower.

I stopped pedaling immediately upon realizing my computer was providing me with kph readings instead of mph. I adjusted the computer to show mph readings, as it normally does. And I completed the rest of my workout, as hollow as it now felt after those first 8 minutes were essentially wasted, in dispirited fashion.

I'm not sure how I managed to inadvertently switch from mph to kph in the first place. But I'm pretty sure it won't happen again. At the very least, from now on I'll be sure to check the readings on my computer before I even get on my bike.

I definitely don't need to again feel as disappointed as I did when I discovered I was in metric mode.