Training Ride 6/30/12

June over.  Not as much mileage as I was planning on.  Between some travel costing me weekend rides, a beta testing weekend, and a tropical storm costing me a weekend day my mileage was probably down.  But it was still a good month.  Kinda crazy to think of a 1000+ mile month as a "down month," so I won't.  July should be great.

Training Run 6/29/12

My slow increasing of distance is going well.  Up to 1.5 miles and no knee pain.  I am happy with my running progress thus far.

Training Ride 6/28/12

Tropical Storm Debbie is gone and there was almost no wind this morning and most importantly no rain.  I'm excited to close out the month of rides on Saturday and start a new one Sunday.

Training... run? 6/27/12

Supposed to bike today.  Tropical storm Debbie said nah.  It was wet and incredibly windy, but that sort of condition will shut down a bike ride but not a run.  So I went out for a nice run, slowly increasing my distance up.  Putting The Plan into motion...


P.S. You can see I'm getting better, as my pace is now below 8 minutes per mile.  Again, The Plan.

Training Ride 6/26/12

Thanks for small miracles.  Rained all day yesterday and will rain all day today.  But at 4am - 6am there was no rain, and the roads were dry.  Hopefully this trend keeps up tomorrow.

Training Run 6/25/12

Run a mile, and no hurt legs.  This is becoming good.  

Training Ride 6/24/12

It was pissing rain on me basically the entire ride.  It never poured or even drizzeled, per se, but it just lightly sprinkled for nearly 3 hours of non-fun.  OH WELL.  Putting in the time is what matters.

Training Ride 6/23/12

So there was a lot of rain on the radar this morning and the forecast was for thunder storms, so I planned to ride 40-50 miles or until there was a threat of rain coming.  As I was going I realized it probably wasn't going to rain until later so I changed on the fly to a metric century, hence the weird route.  I would have gone further but I didn't bring any food and 60 miles is about as far as I can go before eating becomes mandatory, because bonking isn't fun or productive.

Training Run 6/22/12

After my last attempt at running I seriously hurt my MCL so I decided to put away the running shoes for a while.  I felt that I should give it another go today, but instead of trying to be awesome and run a long distance I would do the sensible thing and run a mile or so, and keeping doing it until I built up my running ability enough to go longer.  So I did a mile today around Troy Moody Park.  Pretty fun.

Training Ride 6/21/12

Nice ride today.  A bit on the wet side from last night's rain but can't have everything perfect.  Actually, you can have everything perfect, you just can't have it perfect always.

Training Ride 6/20/12

Interesting ride this morning.  There was a line of storms to the south moving north towards us.  When I turned around at the inlet it was clearly raining just a bit to the south, so my whole ride home was a race against the squall line, which I made by a few minutes.  I'm pretty good at this weather predicting game.

Training Ride 6/19/12

Let the games begin with another week.  Took the road bike out freshly tuned up from the shop on the weekend and it was as smooth as butter.  I didn't feel as strong as I did Saturday morning, but I felt happy, which is good in and of itself.

Training Ride 6/17/12

Road bike in the shop.  Took the TT bike on a very hard half century ride.  50-60 miles is the longest I could imagine riding this thing, I don't know how Iron Men do it for 112.

Training Ride 6/16/12

Really strong ride today.  Four and a half hours of hard riding.  My legs felt insanely strong, and I had no trouble elevating my heart rate.  This was one of those days I wish was a race day so I could have put the form into action.  I snapped a pic of myself while in Sebastian.

New UCF kit looks rad

Training Ride 6/14/12

Another week of dawn attack rides closed out.  I went really hard this morning for no specific reason, but I'm always glad I did.  Got my new UCF kit yesterday, can't wait to take it out this weekend and look resplendent.  

Training Ride 6/13/12

Fun ride, despite it being dark at 4:30AM.  Even if you don't bike or run, just do some exercise first thing after you get up and you'll see how much better your day is.

Training Ride 6/12/12

June really is flying by, we are almost halfway through and it feels like I'm just getting started.  This was my first 4am ride in a long while, and I did not miss it.  But I'll say this: biking at 4am is infinitely better than not biking at 6pm because it's raining.

Training Ride 6/10/12

Took an unplanned rest day yesterday, so I felt like brutalizing myself today with a very long, hot, and hard ride.  Mission accomplished.  I feel dead right now.

And now, a pic from today.  

View from the cockpit and engine

Training Ride 6/8/12

I took the TT bike out for a half century today.  I've done the road bike the last three days and I have about 150 miles to do this weekend so I felt like I needed the TT bike to change the pace.  I pushed it rather hard especially for the 3 miles on Indian River Boulevard when I was pushing at 40km TT pace.

Training Ride 6/7/12

Today was interesting.  I'm not a huge fan of this route due to lot's of traffic lights, but a cool thing happened.  At mile 40 or so I was feeling awful and ready to stop.  But somewhere around mile 50 my legs felt great again and I was a fresh as new.  Usually in endurance sports you don't get a second wind, you just slowly grind down until complete exhaustion, so having this feeling is really rare and great.

Training Ride 6/6/12

Wet and nasty.  Drizzled essentially the entire ride.  I wanted to do 50+ miles but making it up to the inlet would have required riding into a wall of water which wasn't hugely appealing.  In any event, I might try to get a run in later on today as it's national running day.  Did some tabata intervals in my ride today, those seriously burn.

Training Ride 6/5/12

Back in the saddle.  Chicago was nice, but I was so happy to ride again.  No work for me this week so I'm taking the opportunity to do 50ish miles per day, and living like I'm retired.  Don't let boring people tell you you'll be bored if you retire.  

Training Ride 6/2/12

I went hard.  The last hour and a half were at 160+ BPM heart rate.  That's my crit race pace heart rate, and crits usually are only an hour.  So it was a mammoth effort.  Time to pack my bags and fly out for a few days.  When I come back, June begins in earnest.

Training Ride 6/1/12

Happy June everyone.  I normally don't ride on Fridays but I'm going out of town this weekend so I wanted to get the month started out right to avoid digging myself out of a hole later.  I should get a ride in tomorrow morning before my flight, so I really won't be missing too much.  Today's ride up to the inlet was great.  It was super windy but it didn't seen to affect me in the bothersome way that wind often does.  Surfer John was out riding but we weren't going the same direction; too bad because I like riding with a guy that can push me to the limits of my ability.