So my weekend of rest has come to an end. This past weekend marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. What's that mean? I have no idea.
Friday I took off the bike.
Saturday I did a Sourlands ride (MD link here) before the TM. I flatted, and walked out to have a coffee/bagel and hang with Jeff/Bob. I also got to ride with stb222. We're making history with these here blogs, I tell ya. I hope to ride Sourlands more often and work on my technical skills. I'm not a bad technical rider but I could certainly get better. We followed the ride with a 5 hour TM session (slideshow here).
Sunday Woody and I spent mega hours putting this Costco Playset (link) together, or at least some of it. As I sit here it's still not together. As soon as I finish this post I'm going out to work some more.
Monday I took off the bike again.
And so today I decided to do an Individual Time Trial (ITT). The course is a loop through the swamp, 20 miles. I warmed up for 30 minutes:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7866472
I drank a carnation instant breakfast about 20 minutes before the warmup. I tried to get the HR up to race-level 3 times: at 10 minutes, 17, and 26. The warmup was 32 minutes. At about 30 minutes I ate an Accel Gel, 2 minutes before blastoff.
Here's the ride:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7866473
Much of the first half of the ride was in the wind and my left hamstring is still screwy from the weekend - for whatever reason. I guess the TM and playset building had me hurting is ways I didn't expect? It tried to cramp up almost immediately but I rode through it and kept going.
At the 15 mile mark I broke the 20 mph pace, much to my surprise. At this stage of the game I have done no intervals, no threshold work, no high-end work at all. So I was thinking that my over/under would be 19. Never thought I would be up over 20 already.
In the end I kept it up and pushed it to 20.5. The totals:
Miles: 20.05
Time: 58:32
MPH: 20.5
The pisser in this loop is that there's a traffic light and today I hit it. It's actually on a downhill so my overall time is possibly a little higher than it would have been otherwise. But I'm not totally sold on that because I was going straight into a wind that was annoying as anything.
So this is my first real higher end ride of the season, and it turned out to be better than I thought it would. 2 observations I can see right away is that I have no top-end at all. I had no ability to blast up the hills but that's not surprising. The second is that after I was done, I recovered extremely quickly. I think that's what all those base miles are supposed to help with.
Tomorrow I'm still holding out hope that I can meet Scalpel6 at Allaire for some fast and sandy fun. 🙂
Friday I took off the bike.
Saturday I did a Sourlands ride (MD link here) before the TM. I flatted, and walked out to have a coffee/bagel and hang with Jeff/Bob. I also got to ride with stb222. We're making history with these here blogs, I tell ya. I hope to ride Sourlands more often and work on my technical skills. I'm not a bad technical rider but I could certainly get better. We followed the ride with a 5 hour TM session (slideshow here).
Sunday Woody and I spent mega hours putting this Costco Playset (link) together, or at least some of it. As I sit here it's still not together. As soon as I finish this post I'm going out to work some more.
Monday I took off the bike again.
And so today I decided to do an Individual Time Trial (ITT). The course is a loop through the swamp, 20 miles. I warmed up for 30 minutes:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7866472
I drank a carnation instant breakfast about 20 minutes before the warmup. I tried to get the HR up to race-level 3 times: at 10 minutes, 17, and 26. The warmup was 32 minutes. At about 30 minutes I ate an Accel Gel, 2 minutes before blastoff.
Here's the ride:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/7866473
Much of the first half of the ride was in the wind and my left hamstring is still screwy from the weekend - for whatever reason. I guess the TM and playset building had me hurting is ways I didn't expect? It tried to cramp up almost immediately but I rode through it and kept going.
At the 15 mile mark I broke the 20 mph pace, much to my surprise. At this stage of the game I have done no intervals, no threshold work, no high-end work at all. So I was thinking that my over/under would be 19. Never thought I would be up over 20 already.
In the end I kept it up and pushed it to 20.5. The totals:
Miles: 20.05
Time: 58:32
MPH: 20.5
The pisser in this loop is that there's a traffic light and today I hit it. It's actually on a downhill so my overall time is possibly a little higher than it would have been otherwise. But I'm not totally sold on that because I was going straight into a wind that was annoying as anything.
So this is my first real higher end ride of the season, and it turned out to be better than I thought it would. 2 observations I can see right away is that I have no top-end at all. I had no ability to blast up the hills but that's not surprising. The second is that after I was done, I recovered extremely quickly. I think that's what all those base miles are supposed to help with.
Tomorrow I'm still holding out hope that I can meet Scalpel6 at Allaire for some fast and sandy fun. 🙂
