Thursday, March 17, 2011

13 mile bike ride - 3/13/11

Over the past few weeks, I've been spending between 30 and 40 minutes on the rollers a couple-few times a week. Initially, it was 30 minutes with no resistance, just to help things get used to the motion. Then I started adding in a little resistance, followed by upping the time.

Being mid-March, I thought it time to start playing around with daisy chaining workouts, which would essentially begin with doing the equivalent of a sprint tri on Saturdays (about a mile swim, about 15 miles on the bike, and around 4 miles run). Each week I'm thinking I'll up the bike and run, but one of the goals is to minimize the time between activities, so that I can get my body ready for the sustained physical exertion.

So today, because the weather is starting to get nicer, I decided to do a quick out and back trip on the bike that I knew was going to be between 13-15 miles. Assuming a pace of 3-4 minutes/mile - that'd be in the ballpark of the appropriate time increase from the 40 minutes on the rollers I had been doing.

Garmin Results

The first half of this ride felt fairly tough, and I was thinking that I really lost a step, but then I realized, when I turned around, that the wind had a lot to do with it. I believe the turnaround was at the pace drop right around 28 minutes. So that meant the return trip was a full six minutes faster - and it felt it. Can also tell that the HR was around 150 on the way out, and definitely lower (around 140) on the way back.

I noticed that my inner thighs felt fairly fatigued, which initially tell me that I will need to build distance slowly.

I'm thinking that my next ride should be around 20 miles or so.

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