Two Wheel Blogs

This week was a well-earned rest week. Last week was high volume and high intensity. This week was the complete opposite. Last week was filled with blasting out the quads, while this week was filled with golf, lounging around, and family time. I've slept well and eaten better.

Last night's training called for 90 minutes of flat to rolling terrain and nothing too taxing on the cardio side. Since the main road from my house is undergoing construction, I haven't been too apt to take off on the road bikes.

Today was an odd day in terms of weather. Sixty degrees never felt so cool. Perhaps it was the cloudy sky and the perception that it would start raining again any moment. It really made for some phenomenal conditions in my opinion, and it was pretty easy to stay comfortable.

Joe and I met up at his house and rolled out to the YMCA to pick up Dave. Dave is training for his annual event where by he swims n laps then bikes n miles where n equals his age in years. Neat concept if you are a swimmer. Personally my swimming ability lies somewhere between that of a cat in a burlap sack and a stone. I am not sure how many years he has been doing this event, but last year's 50/50 was the first I knew of and I think he rode a bit more than 50 for what it is worth.

Not too much to wow you with. Last night was a recovery ride.

I met up with the club for some spinning and found out that a bunch of other guys were on recovery too. There was probably 15 people on the ride. I had a bit of a plan (recovery ride) so I spent most of my ride with few guys on a similar mission.

A semi-regular rider named Jeremy that hails from KC (but works in JC sometimes) showed up last night. He was still recovering from illness earlier this season that pretty much eliminated any chances of adequately preparing for the Ouachita Challenge. He managed to perform quite well for 50 miles before making the sensible decision to abandon the 80 mile race (rather than risk injury or re-lapse into illness). Last night, he was still in recovery mode.

My body may have returned from vacation, but my form still has not.

I have been sleeping pretty good lately, but I was still dragging my tail around work today. I figured it might prove interesting to do some testing. I hit the rollers today with a crystal clear plan for what sort of workout to do. Basically, I would warm up and then work up the block quickly to maximum resistance then ride it to failure (this is a bit of a trick because you can not totally fail on rollers without crashing).

So basically I ramped up and rode until the RPE told me that any longer would result in a crash, at which time I shifted to an easier gear and spun for a couple songs. Then repeat several times.

This week has been a solid week for me. Nothing over the top, just good efforts all around. Unfortunately for me, my sleeping issues have returned. As I've stated before, I don't sleep well or in many cases, enough. I generally start to wake up around 4am and when I'm up, I'm up. Normally, 7-8 hours is about right, but this week I've been lucky to get 4-5 hours of good sleep. It's Thursday and it's catching up with me. Stress + rest = success, so it needs to get figured out. Quickly.