Monday, January 29, 2007

Frost Bike 50

Frost Bike 50 was the first training ride of the 2007 BP MS150 training season. The ride started at Cy-Fair College and had a pretty good turn out. There were two things that made the ride a bit challenging. The weather was cool and windy. At the start it was around 40 degrees. It warmed up a little during the day but not much. For most of the day the wind was out of the north, and seemed like it was 10-20 mph.

I had decided I was not going to do this ride this year because the last two years the route had one stretch of road that was very rough. Found out the day before that the route had been changed and we would not be riding the bad road. So Vanessa and I figured what the heck. Might as well ride.

We started out and saw our usual friends at the start. The wind was at our back for the start, which meant that we would be heading into the wind from the first turn and up the back side of the route. Nearly half to two thirds of the route was a head wind or a cross wind. But the finish was all tail wind. All in all I was pleased with the new route. We finished the day with a 52 mile ride.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Getting back to it.

After taking most of two weeks off, it has been difficult to get back into training.

After riding last weekend, I got my new training plan last Monday. I did pretty good sticking to it. I rode Tuesday for and hour on the trainer. I was supposed to ride Wednesday, but found I could not find time to get the training in with everything else I needed to get done.

Thursdays for this training plan is intervals. This week it was quite a work out. I was supposed to ride 20 min in zone 1 and then 8 intervals of 4 min zone 4 followed by 4 min of zone 1. The first two sets were not bad. The third was tough, but I was able to recover and try one more set. After completing the 4th set, I was spent. My goal is to complete all 8 sets next week, but I will be happy to complete 5 or 6 sets. The point of the intervals is to decrease my recovery time between high intensity efforts.

This weekend was rainy, and we had to pickup some things out of town so this weekend was a bust for riding. So here is to sticking to the plan for all next week.