Two Wheel Blogs

This past week was a tough one. Not tough from the training perspective, but tough on the mind. It started 1 week ago when I joined the Monday night ride in St. Charles and promptly got dropped 10 miles in the 30 mile ride. That pop of the cork left me to TT for 20 miles at a pace north of 20mph and served as the first slice of humble pie.

Saturday morning brought the TT and my hopes of a top 5 finish in the Cat 4's. I ran a 28:32 on this course last year and thought 27:30 was do-able for me. Unfortunately, I never really felt good on the bike and actually ran 14 seconds slower than last year and while that was good enough for 8th place, I was less than pleased with the effort. Oddly enough, about 1.5 miles into the effort, I actually lost a little bit of my breakfast on the side of the road, but continued on with the race. As I looked back over my files for the race, I noticed I never got my heart rate where I wanted it to be on the outbound loop and when breakfast made it's way outward, there was definitely a negative blip on the HR chart. When I got home at 11am, I slept for 4 hours, so I'm not sure if I was actually a little sick or just ill-prepared for the effort.

Feeling somewhat better Sunday morning, it was time for the crit or more appropriately a mini-circuit race. It was a great course and certainly not your boring 4-corner, flat crit loop. There were 2 climbs and the second one really pinned me on each lap. I didn't get a good starting position and found myself at the tale of the snake checking up into the corners and putting in strong efforts to stay with the pack. After 4 or 5 laps of yo-yo'ing and feeling my legs want to explode, I pulled the plug and bid adieu to the field. I'm a firm believer in finishing what you started and not getting your body used to quitting. Yup, riding off the back can be humiliating, but what other options do you have.

In the end this week held a lot of pain, but a lot of positives. We all know that after really punishing efforts the strength comes.