Need More Bike

Great Service from Power-Couple: Rich & Heather

So we took a trip to the 'new' local bike shop we learned about last week. Rich & Heather were more than friendly, it was great to meet them and check out the shop. Sure enough they have regular rides that I would be interested in if I had a damn bike lol. I scudded mine to build the wife's bike thinking that all my riding this year will be solo training for an Ironman. There were no group rides in the area that I knew of at the time so it was an acceptable sacrifice. Now that I may have found people to ride with, I want a bike! I took a Scott cyclocross bike for a spin and surprisingly at a size smaller than usual, it felt like it fit. My thoughts are leaning towards getting a cyclocross bike and swap in road wheels for the group road rides. This should work in theory. I'm just learning the market right now, keeping an eye out for something that catches my eye. I really like prices on Bikesdirect but you gotta wonder. I am my own tech, so I dont need local bike shop support but still...

Anyhow, obviously I missed a few posts last week. I had so much I wanted to post but no way to express it without being long-winded. Instead I just didn't post anything and now I forget what it was I wanted to talk about. Have no fear though, just because I didn't post doesn't mean I didn't train! As a matter of fact I layed it on pretty thick last week. I still have to upload Garmin data so I will post the week review tomorrow.

In the meantime, I hit a stupdily long bike ride on Saturday. I did 70Km of soggy railtrail which felt like 'spinning' on a stationary trainer with the resistance cranked up all the way. No coasting, no speed - just neverending tough sloggin'.  I got chilled to boot so by the end I had a tad bit of frostbite on my 'big' toe. My legs were so sore afterwards that I couldn't even relax.

56cm Felt like it fit. Strange, I'm usually at LEAST 58cm

Sunday brought a 16Km run. The training schedule shows half of that since I should still be recovering from ATB race but oh well. I tagged along with some really good runners that were just a tad bit faster than what I had in mind. They pushed me, its exactly what I was looking for. It was nice being surrounded by better runners than I, and taking it to the next level. If it had been any other weekend it would have been perfect, except after ATB and Saturday's tough ride I had to dig deep to keep up. I was so tired by the end, I could hardly hold a light jog anymore. My poor wife, she did the whole 16km too and practically died! She's still fighitng illness but came out anyways because she's feeling the pressure of too many missed workouts. If there is one word that describes the chick I married, its is "TOUGH". She's one strong babe to come out and tackle a 16Km run with no water, no workouts for several weeks and pretty much the longest run she had done in months. I guess you could call her stupid too, I mean she's with me right? :) lol. I'm so proud of her!

Leaning towards this, I dunno.

So back to regularly scheduled programming. My training program steps up a notch this week but the weather aint' co-operating for the outdoor bike rides. I'm going to have to do some rearranging of my schedule this week. Plus I need to get my head straightened out. Yes, my legs are sore. Yes, I'm tired. No, that is no excuse to miss a workout. I need to make sure I'm taking time out due to injury/sloppiness and not just because of mere fatigue. Although I did have knee pain saturday, but I'll pretend it wasn't there and see if it surfaces during my next ride. Stop the lousy excuses, just do the workouts.

Oh and I had a crazy deep sleep last night, the icing on the cake was that it was through a brutal thunderstorm that shook the house and it just felt that much better. I like lightning/rain/thunder as it makes me sleep that much better. I loved it!

Shopping for bikes is almost as fun as riding them.

TRAINING:

Bike - 4:30hrs
Run - 1:50hrs (Guesstimate, havent looked at GPS data yet)