Given that I got to spend this weekend holding down the fort while the wife headed down to LA to assist with moving duties (I would have gone but the process started on Friday and I had to teach classes), I decided that today would be an excellent opportunity to do a solo century. I had a couple of pictures I wanted to get so I started out in a direction that would let me get the first set early in the ride and then I decided I'd make the rest up as I went along. It was a really interesting way to go because I went out and rode a couple of roads that were new to me and investigated some things I've been meaning to check out for a while.
The difficulty with training rides is that I usually have a limited amount of time due to other weekday obligations and I have some training goals I'd like to meet so I tend to pick routes that I know will fit the bill for the day whether that's a route with lots of flat and some county line signs for sprint intervals or a hill loop (usually Hog or Hagan's Montain) for hill repeats. If I want to do some long climbing drills I'll ride out a ways to a couple of places with two or three mile climds that average 7-8%. Since I was making it up as I went along today and the only goal I had was to get a hundred miles under the wheels in whatever time I felt like, I had a lot freedom and flexibility. So, I went out a road a use for a few different training loops but instead of turning where I usually do, I crossed the highway and ventured into terra incognito for a bit. I knew how everything connected up down the road so the worry of getting lost was non-existant and I could enjoy the ride. I saw some really odd things like what looked to be an abandoned rec park with dilapidated softball fields, a tower built out of stone with a metal dome at the top that looked like a cross between an ancient watchtower and a skinny observatory and an old house and truck that I think I'll go back to and take pics of very soon.
The training goal was to do the ride at an average heart rate between 145 and 150 which is really low for me. Usually when I ride a century I'm usually riding between 160 and 170. The idea was to do long slow distance and have a lot of energy throughout the ride. The wisdom of this became very apparent when 30 miles into the ride the wind picked up to about 15 mph with gusts over 20. I was able to increase my output level as needed and then back off when I was riding with the wind at my back. For the entire ride I averaged 150 with a pace of 20.8 mph which was pretty good, especially considering I had to fight the wind head on for about 35 miles of my ride.
The pic shown is a gas pump that's on a couple of training routes I do. It's at the top of a hill so it makes a great sort of "landmark/goal" when your doing a sprint interval up the hill. Today, the hill was ridden up easily since it came about 89 miles into the fun and my legs were pretty much content to spin along at an easy pace. The really bizarre thing (you might be able to pick it out in the photo) is that the owner has put the carcass of some bass he caught in the lake at the bottom of the hill in the glass part of the old pump. It's sort of nasty but it's also really funny, especially when I take riding buddies on the route and they see it for the first time. Who knows, maybe sometime we can ride out there together and you can see it in person.
Thanks for Reading.
