More than I bargined for

June 13, 2009
WOW! Not what I’d planned for today. I left my house at 6:30 am to hook up with a group ride starting at 7:00 am. I meet them on the on the road and had already put in a, much too hard effort, to meet them before they left. I averaged 22.3 mph on my warm-up. Not really much of a warm up at that intensity. My workout today called for a solid warm-up, 80 minutes at tempo and a long cool down. I needed to spend 3.5 hours on the bike today. I quickly found out the group’s ride plan was about 65-70 miles. This was more than I really wanted, but I figured I could cut off somewhere along the way and ride home solo. We were into a long climb within 20 minutes and by the top, I already had 80 minutes of tempo riding completed. Then my power meter started giving me erroneous readings. It would show 0 watts during a hard effort and 930 watts while in a pace line. I pulled off from the group to re-zero it and see if that would fix the problem. It did for a few minutes. Then the squirrely readings returned and it finally only read 0. I felt sure the battery had died. This is very discouraging and disheartening when you are specifically training based on power and you have no data. Plus this is how my coach determines the quality of my effort and workout. I debated on bailing out and heading back to replace the battery. Note to self; put spare battery in seat bag. I opted to continue on the ride. .I put in several long, hard efforts at the front. Each time as I would pull off and make my way toward the back of the line, the riders passing would comment on how strong I was riding. I have ridden with most of these guys in the past, so maybe they are a good gauge that my training is, in fact, helping my performance. It’s like when people around you everyday don’t notice you’ve lost weight, but someone you haven’t seen in a while is amazed at how much thinner you look. We started with 10 riders and 2 were repeatedly dropped. They were finally shelled for good at about 55 miles into the ride. I stayed at the front the entire ride. 3 or 4 of us did the majority of the work. As on any group ride, some riders never take a pull and sit in for the entire ride. This is fine, but they will never get much better if they don’t put in their efforts at the front of the pace line. My 3.5 hour ride turned into a 5 hour, 80 mile ride. I was not expecting that long of a ride and was not really prepared to be out that long. I had only 1 flask of gel, 1, energy bar, 1 bottle of water and a bottle of sport drink. I was able to refill bottles at one stop and the guys split some Powerade with me at a store stop. Surprisingly, I did not bonk. I still had 2 servings of gel left in the flask when I got home. I did limp home once I separated from the group. I was pretty spent and did not have much left in the tank. I am pretty sore from the effort and need to spin out my legs a little on Sunday. My proposed ride is only 30 minutes of active recovery, or full, inactive, recovery. I’ll see how I feel and go from there.

June 12, 2009
Today’s workout proved to be more intense than I had expected. I did 10 sets of single leg drills. I was out for a little over an hour. I really could feel the effort afterwards. My quads were really tight and starting to get a little sore.