Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Single Speed Epic

It's time to start training for the first race of the year. It's an XXC race. So instead of 20 miles on the Dragon's Back, a very challenging and rough course, it is 35 miles with an 8 hour time limit. It will be an accomplishment just to finish.
To start training, Allen and I decided to ride at Peaksview and do 4 race laps. That's about 28 miles. Start out easy, right? We began at 10:25. The temp was about 30 degrees, so every thing was still frozen. We wanted to see how far we could go without stopping at all. We made a bet, who ever called a break first would buy protein shakes after the ride. After 1 and a quarter laps, Allen finally called a break. We ended up taking 1 break per lap, except for the last lap. We were both shredded by then.
By the third lap, the ice was turning into mud. The fourth lap was a mess. Sticky slimey mud was everywhere. The whole day was done at a medium pace, not slow, but not at race speed either. By the time we exited lap 4, I had nothing left.
It was a great training day. I have not been worked that hard in a long time. I felt very good about myself today. Tommorow we are leading a ride for some people from Roanoke at Candler's. If someone told me that I would someday be using Candler's as a recovery ride, I would have probably just laughed. Soon we will be stepping it up to 5 laps, yea!

1 comment:

Jen said...

Welcome to blogdom!!!!! I'll add you as a link on mine now!