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May 12, 2007
Another Day at the Office
This triathlon business could certainly pass for a full time job! I started "work" at 7 am this morning - first to the pool for a 3000 yd workout, and then a 4 hour ride that ended around 2:30 this afternoon. Throw in my shower and stretching after the ride and you have a standard shift at the hospital I work at: 7-3:30. :)
AM swim workout:
3000 yds @YMCA
wu: 700 easy, 6x50 w/20 sec rest alt breast, back, free
ms: 14x100 on 1:30, 12x50 on :50
This is my Sunday swim but I had to change it to today because we have mother's day festivities to attend to tomorrow. I'm actually going to have to change all my Sunday swims to Saturdays now though as my YMCA closes on Sundays during the summer. Anyway, I went back and forth all day yesterday as to whether I wanted to swim before or after my ride. The YMCA doesn't open until 8 am on Saturdays so by doing my swim first I wouldn't get started on my ride until nearly 10 am - but in the end that's what I decided to do anyway. Afterall, the swim is the first discipline in triathlon... :)
I got started on my ride around 9:45 am. I won't lie - these 4 hour rides sort of intimidate me. It's just a long time to be sitting on a bike. Of course not nearly as long as if I was training for a full IM and doing 6 or 7 hour rides!
Overall it was a great ride. I adheared to my coach's "rule of thirds" in doing 1/3 of the ride on flat terrain, 1/3 of the ride on rolling terrain and 1/3 of the ride on hills. When you have almost 75 miles of riding to play with you can easily get all 3 in! :) I felt pretty good throughout although the last hour I was just getting sore from sitting in the aero position - neck, arms, etc... It was much hotter today (~75-80 degrees) than any of my long rides thus far so it was a good opportunity to try out my nutrition/fluid in conditions more like what I'll be racing in this summer. Unfortunately I had a little nutrition snafu....
The roads around this place are horrible! Potholes, temporary patches of potholes, rough roads in general, big craters in the roads, etc... It's always worse after winter (the salt eats away at roads I think...) before they get the road crews out to repair things. Anyway, going over all these holes and bumps is hard on the cyclist! Today I hit a big one (actually many big ones) and one of my water bottles launched off my back water bottle rack (the rack that I have mounted underneath me seat). ARGGHH!! No big deal though - it's happened before, I'll just go collect it and be on my merry way again. Trouble is, when I got back to it the top had popped off and 20 oz of fluid and 250 kcals of nutrition were now splashed all over the road. Bummer. Besides licking it up off the road I was going to have to go to Plan B - the $5 in my pocket that I always take with me for such an occasion. About 3 hours later (my bottle launching happened very early on) I decided I needed something cold to drink and I needed it now! Already out of fluid I stopped at a convience store in search of Gatorade. I wasn't quite sure what to do with my bike though. Take it in? Leave my $3500 gem outside for someone to steal it? Yep, take it inside with me it is! I got some strange looks but really I didn't care. I was just so thirsty and set on getting the Gatorade! I took my sweaty, nasty 5 dollar bill out of my jersey and apologized to the clerk for it being wet. "Oh - that's okay - as long as it's not wet from sweat!" "Um yeah...no...that's not sweat...nope!" HA!!
That Gatorade never tasted so good.
So I rode just about 74 miles. And boy was I ready to get off that bike when I finally arrived home. Another good training day in the books. Another good dat at the office! :)
Posted by beth at May 12, 2007 5:32 PM
Comments
Hey! I just wanted to share my bike locking strategy.
I have a big lock that I use on my bike when I'm storing it in the basement of my buiding on the bike rack down there or for when I'm traveling with my bike on the back of my car and I want to lock my bike to the car for when I stop at rest areas, etc. (I loop the cable through the little hitch on the bottom of my car and then lock the frame of the bike and one of the tires to the cable-which is attached to the hitch). For when I'm riding my bike I have a smaller lock that stores by looping around my seatpost. There is no bracket for it or anything. That's for if I have to quickly stop and use a restroom, run into a store, etc. It's not as good as the larger lock obviously, but the tradeoff is I can actually ride with it b/c it's light. Then, when I race, I don't keep any lock on it since the small lock just pulls right off.
Anyway, impressive ride today!!! You sound happy!
Posted by: Audrey at May 12, 2007 6:34 PM
Not a bad day at the office. If you ever train for a full Ironman, will you have to quit your real job? ;)
Sorry to hear about losing your drink and food. The story did make me chuckle, though. Especially the part about pattering through the convenience store with your clicky bike shoes and trailing a bike behind you. I'm glad it worked out.
Posted by: Meghan at May 14, 2007 11:35 AM