A Thin Line

A team mate and I were discussing blogs on Sunday morning, and we came to the conclusion that it's a thin line between being entertaining an being a complete buffoon. Which I think was his nice way of welcoming me to buffoonery.

My first official “man do I need to go vomit after that” workout of the new year has come and gone. This is the same workout where I inadvertently broke my 5 and 30 minute power benchmarks last time. Well, I did it again this time. Breaking the 30 minute was a complete shocker since my off intervals were much more off than they were last time. I threw in a couple of 10 minute low threshold intervals in the beginning to bulk the workout up to its planned time, which took away some of my eagerness during the low rpm stuff. When I got to the 5 minute “hammer” part, it was easy to aim for the old mark so I did. Easy to aim for, tough to hit. At the end of the 5 minutes I was pretty cooked, and it made sense that I had beaten the old number – I worked harder. My heart rate through the interval was higher than last time, my RPE was higher and the pool of sweat on the floor was bigger, and the result was 8 watts higher average power. If I want to increase the 5 minute number again, it will only come through getting stronger. I could put up a better 30 minute number, but it’s close enough to be very useful.

Saturday, there was a Sugarloaf plan afoot. I didn’t have time to do the whole thing, so I rode with the group out to Berryville. The ride was nice if unmemorable, except that I was clearly still feeling some of the “benefit” of Friday’s workout. I even had a bit of saddle hurt, which I never have, but makes sense since the meat of the Friday workout is sitting and grinding. On the way home, I passed a group containing a bunch of local Cat 3 and 4 all stars, who nearly got wiped out by some lady making a left onto River, yakking on a cell phone.

The afternoon on Saturday was all house hunting. The DC real estate world is a whole lot nicer now than it was a year or two ago. It was almost exactly a year ago that we said “screw it, everything is so ridiculous that we are never going to move.” Now, not so much. There are some neighborhoods that are really cool where you can actually get a real, honest to goodness, your own front door house without being J Paul Getty.

Sunday was the team ride, which included a bunch of the walking wounded from Sugarloaf. They all looked pretty worked, except Greg was flying the Maple Leaf pretty high. But he’s like 16 and takes EPO, so he doesn’t count. Another good run up Great Falls, leaving my group, but nowhere near 3:15. That’s just a silly number. Afterwards, we got the 4 squad together for beers and a chat about the coming season. I'm optimistic.

Next week ought to be a rest week, but it doesn’t look that easy, so I am going to have to find some inspiration other than “next week’s easy” to drag my sorry, rapidly aging ass through the next 5 days.