Base

Getting plenty of rides in with team mates.

The family road fleet.

Fun

A thorny start to the '11 MTB campaign.

We may or may not have given ourselves a sneak preview of this. It may or may not be awesome.

Heavy miles lately. This zone 2 that people like to do, I don't know too much about that. Lately the weekends have been about "go hard for 3 or 4 hours and come back exhausted." I feel like it's been hugely beneficial. Saturday was interesting in that 1) we almost got blown off the road and into Oz several times and 2) we were about to climb Blue Mountain but were stopped and turned around by firemen racing to the scene of a brush fire up the hill. That must have been pretty horrorshow to manage that situation for them. Hope it turned out okay.

I got a pretty good test on Mount Weather, even though the Route 7 side is a bit short to do a good test (I was hoping Blue Mountain would be the really good test). I think that staying a quarter step down from what I've previously done in "threshold" efforts has worked well. In 20 minutes, you can actually add a big anaerobic component to what's supposed to be a purely aerobic thing, and I think my physiology is good at doing that. Result is that I believe the classic "your LT is 95% of what you can do for 20 minutes" overstates the level below which I can stay purely aerobic. I'm more comfortable with what I've been doing now, but of course Saturday showed me that my level needs to be set about 5% higher than what I've been using so it won't hurt any less I'll just go faster.

The 2011 mountain bike campaign started yesterday (the wife's foray at Snotcycle notwithstanding) at Fountainhead. HUGE props to the people from The Bike Lane for doing a ton of trail work. We need to lend a hand with that this year. Last year we were all talk about it. Anyhow, we started off at the speed our legs could go and quickly wound up frustrated and bouncing all over the place. Once we recalibrated to focus more on getting our skills back underneath us, we had a much better time. It's going to take an ass ton of skills work to get where we both want to be on the trails this year.

And in other news, you can actually get drunk on meat. We went to Fogo de Chao last night. That shit is good, but I seriously was getting delirious.