Allons-y!

May 11

Was taking comp photos up near lake Z and decided to swing by Andy's house and say hello. One of the first things he said to me was that I looked like I had lost weight since he last saw me. I dunno if he was using his slick salesman talk on me or what, but it sure made me feel good and helped renew my motivation to keep shedding the pounds. Wow, even more neighbor drama. So we were having our kid's birthday party tonight and he had some friends over (the 13 y/o). We were all out having a picnic on the back patio and Brynn had set up the little boys' plastic picnic table over kind of near the fence but next to the patio (it's only about 10 feet or so from the patio to the fence). While we were eating our neighbor's dog was out, neighbors weren't even home, and the dog was barking at our kids while they were eating. I grabbed the hose and the next time she barked at them (they were actually pretty scared, even though we have two dogs of our own) I squirted her with the hose. That was all it took and she went and got on their deck. I felt a little sorry for her because it wasn't her fault she was out, but all the same I have to do what's necessary to protect my family and keep the bad guys from scaring my kids (whether those bad guys are people or animals). She started to work her way closer and closer throughout the meal and all I had to do was raise the hose wand at her to get her to back off again. Then we finished dinner and played some badminton in the back yard. The neighbors got home and decided to play in their back yard too. Well, the man and the kids played, the wife stared at us like she always does. Then we had cake time and the dog started barking at the kids again, and one of our kids decided to eat his cake inside because he was so afraid. The dog kept barking, so I asked the lady who was not even 6 feet from the dog to do something about the dog because it was scaring my kid. She said, "I can't help that the dog is out here." Uhh... really? Pretty sure it comes in your house every day. I just said, "Well she's standing there barking in my kid's face and he's getting scared." She replied, "Well you should move your kid." I said, "My kid isn't the one barking." Then she moved the dog away and said "I don't care." Awesome. I can't wait to move. Not that our new neighbors are guaranteed to be better, but at least there's that hope.

May 10

Run #1
  • 05m 34s
  • 0.59 miles
  • 09m 26s /Mi

Accidentally forgot to change it from bike mode to run mode.

Run #2
  • 33m 02s
  • 3.13 miles
  • 10m 33s /Mi
Bike #1
  • 23m 04s
  • 4.83 miles
  • 12.55 Mi/hr

Ride with Goosie to Culver's where we shared a banana split!

Bike #2
  • 28m 39s
  • 4.85 miles
  • 10.16 Mi/hr

Ride with Goosie to the park and then home after Culver's. Goosie is the name we use to refer to our 2 y/o. His name is basically the Hebrew version of "Joseph" so being the linguists we are we started playing around with it, and eventually he became "Goosie" or "The Goose" or "Ghoulie". He's totally cool with all of those names :)

Running with the wife this morning once she gets back from dropping the kids off. I think I'll start out easy and then back off from there. I started a Beastie Boys station on my Pandora and I'm kind of liking it so far! Tone Loc raps in limerick metre.

May 9

Okay Bri, slow down... recovery week. Get stronger through rest and reduced volume. Breathe. Phew :) Looking at my totals I see that I have biked over half my April mileage and the month is only 1/3 through! Also I'm 18 days into my no caffeine regimen and I'm kind of liking it. Monday I was eating lunch with Brynn and thinking about how I've plateaued at the 207-208 mark with my weight and I've decided I need to cut out the fast food. Just this past weekend we had Godfather's Pizza Friday night, Saturday I at Casey's Pizza in the AM (on the way to Kansas) and in the PM I ate Sonic. Sunday I ate pretty sensibly and Monday was back at Taco Bell. Also since I've stopped indulging in caffeine I've been drinking regular soda that is not caffeinated (root beer, sprite, etc) so getting lots of unnecessary calories that way too. So until race day it's no caffeine, no soda, no fast food for me. I'd like to actually be under 200 by race day but I don't know if that would be too much weight loss too soon. I'm hoping that if I keep my food quality higher (by cutting out the soda and fast food) I'll be able to lose weight without having to eat less.

May 8

Bike #1
  • 22m 46s
  • 6.42 miles
  • 16.92 Mi/hr

Ride from Joyride Bicycles to the time trial start. Fast pace for the HR (115 average) because there was a 14 mph tailwind the whole way.

Bike #2
  • 1h 18m 46s
  • 24.91 miles
  • 18.98 Mi/hr

The course was a teeny bit short, finished in 1:17 flat and I hit the split on my watch but didn't stop it until I had cooled down a couple minutes. I was hoping for more but I'm pleased with this result. Hopefully by the time the sprint/olympic tri season starts I'll be able to maintain 19mph AND do a run afterwards :)

Not sure if the yPwr field on the BT logs is for Normalized power, but that's what I put in there. It said I had a brief pull of over 1,000 watts and I'm not sure if I should believe it. A few times I was pushing and pulling on the pedals trying to break the bike in half going up some hills toward the end, but those other ones are in the upper 500s for watts, not the thousands.

---

So a little recap of the ride: started out going into a stiff headwind for about 8 miles. I knew once we turned it would be a slight headwind/mostly crosswind, so my plan was to hold back in upper Z2 until I hit the third turn before I started letting loose. This would get me through the hilly sections without blowing up as well as let me drop the hammer when the wind was at my back and make up any time I lost to anybody who spent the first half working their tails off in the wind.

I was talking to a guy named Topher beforehand about how my goal was to hold back enough on the windy section to have enough gas left in the tank to hammer the second half. He said something like, "I dunno man, once you get passed you might throw that out the window." Well that didn't happen exactly like that, but what did happen is after I turned to go North (the first turn) I saw the first rider up ahead and I was like a shark who had smelled blood in the water--I was on a mission! The first person went about 4 minutes ahead of me and then I think everyone else was about a minute or two after each other based on their projected finish times. So to catch the first rider after a short time was really encouraging. It was also a little unnerving because I was wondering when I was going to get caught by the people behind me. Part of me wanted to get caught because I wasn't 100% familiar with the course and didn't want to make a wrong turn. Well, I didn't end up getting caught until the second turn by the guy who ended up crossing the line first (theoretically we should have crossed the line at the same time if we had all projected our avg. speeds correctly). Then it was another couple of miles before I was caught by a group of 3 who were drafting off each other, so I guess I was okay losing time to that group. It's just a recreational ride and they were all roadies, so whatever. That was about the time I decided to dial it up a notch. I had been keeping my power right around the 200 mark because I realized that once I started going over that my HR went into Z3. So I hovered around 230 for a little while until about 3 miles to go I look back and I see another guy catching me. I started standing on the hills at that point and trying to hold 250 even down the hills. I tell ya, it was tough!

Having the power meter made pacing MUCH easier, especially into the wind and up the hills. Knowing that ~200w corresponds to upper Z2 HR for me helped me to drop my gears faster going uphill than I was doing when I rode the Kansas course on Saturday, so that was a little eye-opener that I was pushing a little hard on the hills that day. I'm really looking forward to next weekend when I do another epic long ride (probably going for 60) and having a few more rides under my belt where I get a better feel for my power numbers and their relationship with my HR numbers. I think this was a really smart purchase for me.

Bike #3
  • 20m 30s
  • 5.16 miles
  • 15.10 Mi/hr

Ride home from the TT. Legs were NOT happy with this! :)

So our most wonderful neighbors across the street called the cops on us yesterday. They're very concerned with where we park our cars (they just park in their yards) so whenever they feel we've parked inappropriately (on our side of the street, in front of our own house) they raise a fuss. Well I guess they'd had enough and called the cops. Unfortunately for them, all of our cars were on our property in our driveway. The "offending" car belonged to a tile worker who was at our house installing a floor in our basement bathroom. The police officer talked to the guy and the guy asked if they called because they were planning on leaving. The officer said they weren't. So the tile guy said, "Well I'm going to be done in about twenty minutes and then I'm leaving, so if it's all the same to her I'm not going to move my car until then." I think the officer was amused more than anything. The funniest part of all of this is that the guy who owned the car works for a tiler who is friends with the guy across the street. So they essentially called the cops on a "friend of a friend" instead of their neighbor. I have no idea what we did to piss in their Wheaties, but they sure have ramped up their hatred toward us. I got a lecture about a month ago from the guy about being neighborly. I guess being neighborly goes out the window when you sit around on your butt all day with nothing else to do but make everybody else miserable. --- Well, we're outside the city limits but under the city zoning jurisdiction, so in the R-2 zoning district you can park in your front yard outside of an enclosed structure ONLY IF you have a concrete driveway or equivalent (brick, gravel, etc). So I made sure to report to the building and safety inspector that the neighbors across the street are violating that portion of the zoning code. I'm curious to see what happens. We're planning on selling our house sometime within the next year or so and the last thing I need is people coming to look at the house to potentially buy it and seeing that the neighbors are parking their junky cars in the yard. That would be enough to scare off some people. ...................... Didn't realize I was going to be riding 38 miles tonight... whoops! So much for "recovery" week ;)

May 7

You know, for as much working out I did this weekend I'm actually feeling pretty darn good today. Thinking about doing a light spin to work some of the kinks out. Feeling better today than I was this time a week ago, and I did 16 fewer bike miles and 0.8 fewer run miles last weekend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9NF2edxy-M

May 6

Run
  • 1h 15m 35s
  • 7.05 miles
  • 10m 43s /Mi

Only had a few instances of HR strap funkiness, so that was nice to have some decent HR data for this run.

Felt really good all things considered. After 10K the wheels started to fall off, but I pushed through anyway. Since I did the huge ride yesterday (16 miles farther than my longest this year) I decided to take it easy on the body today and do a 4 min run/ 1 min walk interval throughout. I actually averaged 3 seconds per mile FASTER today than my 6.2-miler last week when I did 4:30 run/ :30 walk. Whoa!

Since I didn't do the T-run after the ride yesterday I'm going to take a nap now and do my long run when I get up. Got an invite on Monday on Facebook to go do a 40k time trial on Tuesdays. With my schedule last week I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it but I think I'm going to see how I feel after my recovery day tomorrow. I think it would be really nice to be able to do it now that I have the Power Tap fully hooked up and ready to go, to give me an idea of my power over 40k that I will be able to compare on pretty much a weekly basis over the summer . So I'm hoping I feel recovered enough to do it and do well, but there's always next week, and next week, etc.

May 5

Bike
  • 3h 28m 07s
  • 56.00 miles
  • 16.14 Mi/hr

Kansas course. More details to come when I have a little bit more time.

Well no wonder I felt so bad, I spent 45 minutes in Z3 and another 17 in Z4 (almost 2 minutes in Z5!) That's just poor pacing. Part of it was I was hanging with the fast guys at the beginning, just chatting away. I was in the mid-150s which is right in the middle of my Z3. Then toward the end of the ride where it got really hilly my HR had started to creep so what "felt like" 150-ish BPM was around 156. I was doing 20+mph across the entire dam at 156bpm, just couldn't get it to go down even when I dropped down a gear. Going up the dam hill I was doing 6.2mph, that felt pretty awful.

So from what I can tell, the first half of the course (with a few exceptions) is more or less flat/gentle rollers. After that, it's more aggressive rollers and very little flat until you turn on that 750 Rd and that 660 Diagonal Rd (I think that's what it was named anyway). Also of course 1000 road and the dam are flat too, but then there are boogers going both to as well as through the park to get to T2. I'm thinking I will stick to mid-Z2 for the flat sections and go especially easy once the hills start after the bridge that goes over the west side of the lake. There's a huge hill there and then you turn right and you're on another huge hill about 2/3 of a mile later.

For this ride the temps were 90 degrees and the wind was out of the south/southeast at what I would estimate to be 15 miles per hour, with a few gusts 20-25mph. Ideal wind conditions (well, besides no wind) would be out of the Southwest because then it's essentially pushing you back toward T2 for much of the time.

I was dumb and brought a whole TWO water bottles, both with Gatorade I had mixed/frozen the day before. They were completely thawed by the time we started riding and I had to be stingy with how much I drank out of them, knowing it was going to be a long day and there were no aid stations. I made them last and only had to take a little bit of Justin's water at the first turn-around (I think the 20 mile mark) because I was craving plain water. After I got done I got a 32-oz Gatorade out of my car and even though it was very warm I chugged half of it. The fast guys asked me if I wanted a beer which I declined, but I did take them up on an offer for a cold water, and I slammed that thing in less than a minute! It's strange because I didn't feel like I was dehydrated or dying of thirst (which I fully expected to feel by the end, plus possibly a headache, but neither occurred). With how much I drank afterward, obviously my body really needed some hydration and it felt SUPER good to get some in me. One of the guys (John) had the same bike as me AND he had the Speedfil hydration system so I took a look at how he had it set up and asked a few questions. Now I'm confident I can get mine all hooked up and ready for action. Apparently the thing holds 40 ounces! Pretty awesome.

My PowerTap came in yesterday! I wasn't expecting it until Monday because that's what the USPS website kept saying. Stayed up until the wee hours of the morning wiring everything up (it's a wired powertap, used of course because this guy is a cheapskate:) ) and now I'm ready to rock and roll for the big ride today. w00t w00t! ========= My back pain still hasn't gone away and i'm thinking it's not muscular but rather skeletal. I get these sharp stabbing pains as I'm moving around and it's really annoying and painful. In other news, my good pal Justin let me borrow his chain whip so I could swap out the cassette on my trainer wheel to the PT. It was surprisingly simple and once I get some more spending money saved up I will buy one of those tools for myself. I also took Brynn's cassette off her rear wheel (you know, the one missing as spoke because of our little collision a couple months ago) and put it on my trainer wheel which is actually a better wheel any way. Going to have someone replace the spoke and true the wheel and then try to sell it for a little extra cash. I ride the trainer so infrequently anyway and with the PT I'm going to be using that wheel no matter where I'm riding so it doesn't make sense to have all these wheels everywhere taking up space.

Bripod's Training Log


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