Wednesday 2 June 2010

Elusive Until It Ain't

Are you there the fast? It's me, Dave.

I try to keep on a pretty logical training schedule. I'm pretty diligent about things. It's super rare that I'll just blow off a workout, and even when more important (or at least less avoidable) stuff happens, I'll usually try to sneak some kind of workout in. A week and a half ago, we took off for a weekend of family stuff, and then work went rager psychotic for a couple of days and I wound up not riding for 5 days, including a full weekend. The stuff that precluded riding was stressful/taxing enough that when I was able to ride on Wednesday a week ago, I thought it best to do a longish (for a school night) endurance-tempo-ish ride instead of the LT intervals I would have done. Then I jumped into the Goon on Thursday and struggled a bit but was okay. Little did I know then that I'd wind up a week later with a trailing week workload of over 15 hours and some psychotic (for me) number of miles, around 300 or so.

Yesterday morning, my legs just cold hurt. Sitting in a chair, they hurt. Monday was a nice coffee shop ride at wicked mellow pace, just like you're supposed to do after a hard block, but still I was just dying yesterday morning. Then, throughout the day, the pain slipped away. I was able to sneak out of work reasonably early (my 4pm is probably your 6pm) and had a good tempo to sweet spot roll in mind. What better place to do that than up Beach? (Actually MacArthur is way better but you know where this is headed.) It was really easy to keep right on target, things felt good. 25 or so minutes later, oh hi Goon Ride, sure I'll jump in. Sometimes it's really slow up at the top, last night it wasn't. I had to break 30 a few times to get on, but once on I just enjoyed the flow from lots of horsepower up front. I figured I'd just hang on the back and play a little hide the salami (the game you play where you see how close to the front you can get without getting on the front, and without pissing anyone off). That was fun, and then I felt like seeing what was up in the front so rotated through a few times. All good. Onto the hill, usual suspect #1 had a big gap with another guy since they took a wet turn like psychos. Usual suspect #2 just made a doppler noise as he bridged at the hard right bend, as the other guy from the front dropped off. That road surface is just treacherous when it's wet, and some guys a ways behind slid out through the hard right bend, never a welcome noise. So it's me and two others behind two guys we know we're not getting back without preposterous effort.

The thing is, I went into this thing thinking that I should be completely punched out, maybe one or two hard little efforts and I'd be worked. Not the case at all. Instead I was kind of thinking that Senor The Fast was entering the neighborhood and headed to my house. Why? I don't know. It shouldn't be. I don't want it to be. This weekend I've got work preventing me from doing Church Creek, and then Iron Hill MTB race on Sunday. The fast doesn't really help me in a mountain bike race because all that does is make me smack into the treewith that much extra forza. Then, next weekend, I'm going sailboat racing (apparently not every boat on the east coast has lost my number), a perfect use of the fast. I've secured a beach cruiser for the weekend in RI as a training platform, so when you go out to Ocean Drive and see some dude bombing around in the aero position on a beach cruiser, that'll be me. By the time Washington County rolls around, I should be slow as molasses all over again.

Random Hammers Of The Week: Chris McGill has got the fast, and bad. Dude is flying lately. Mike Zoeller has it too.

1 comment:

TerribleTerry said...

So is it a good thing if I'm a professional at hiding the salami?