Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, February 25, 2008

This is the first weekend in a while that I've had where my ride schedule has been entirely determined by me. It was also the first weekend where we actually had reasonably good weather both days. Given this, I feel like it's been about the most fun of any weekend I've had on the bike in a while.

Saturday the wind was up at a pretty good clip so I rode into it for the first half of the ride and then got to turn around. I sort of slogged through the first part of the ride but managed to keep my average above 20 mph and when I made the turn I was Lance Armstrong all of the sudden; riding at 25+ mph. I did a little climbing on the route but mostly it was good tempo work.

On Sunday the wind had subsided and we needed to head down to Tarmac to get a few things so I plotted out a metric century route and headed out about noon. Despite not feeling great at first, I sort of yelled at myself for being a weenie for a bit and got my legs going by about mile 10 and then really got on top of a big gear. I kept telling myself that I wanted to meet this goal or that at a certain speed and managed to talk my way through the entire ride. At the end I had done 64 miles at a 22 mph average which was phenomenal.

The only negative for the whole weekend is that I hit a sharp piece of gravel in the road and cut down one of my new Maxxis tires. It's one of the hazards down here when it rains. On the country roads the drainage is usually bad enough that when we get a lot of rain, as we've done over the last week or so, the runoff pushes a lot of stuff out into the roads where the cars tend to scatter it through intersections. I managed to use the old dollar bill fix to get myself home but the tire was a loss which is a bit of a bummer

On a random note, I've kind of decided that on real training rides I'm not going to listen to podcasts anymore. I dig listening but I think that my mind wanders from the task at hand and I end up not pushing myself as hard. I'll still listen on recovery days but when I want to train I'll keep it music only. This likely means I'll have to cut back on the number of podcasts I download. I get way too many now and my listening time will diminish now.

On another note, the Bicycling magazine "Buyer's Guide" came to my home this week. For the first time I felt no pangs of bike lust. While I admired the Pinerello Prince in an ad I didn't really feel this desire to own it. I guess I'm pretty happy with what I've got and the only thing that really gets me excited is the Specialized Tarmac SL frame in Candy Apple red. Boy is that a sweet looking frame. I've also been digging the Stumpjumper FSR frame this year. I really like the lines...very swoopy, which is cool for a mountain bike.

This week is all recovery rides. I woke up last night and my whole body was stiff from the metric. I could feel all of my body's power channels from my shoulders down to my legs because they were all complaining. Not badly enough to have to take anything but enough to remind me that I'm not 35 anymore. So I'll spin around in the nice weather today and ride inside for the rain and wind we're supposed to get for tomorrow and Wednesday. This coming weekend is the Albany Georgia Cup race and so I want to be set for that.

Anyways, thanks for reading and have a great week.

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