Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

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Acheiving a milestone

Thanks to the short nature of the racing I'll be doing later this year (every race is less than an hour) I thankfully won't be expected to do the Lance Armstrong style 6-8 hour daily training rides all Spring. But early on my coach said I would have to eventually work up to a regular midweek 3 hour training ride.

It sounds pretty tame as I've done 6-8 hour rides on Cycle Oregon and in the Portland Century, but it's actually pretty hard to do a 45-50 mile ride by yourself near your home with regularity. It requires the following things to go right:

• Safe: off major highways, with as little traffic as possible
• Nearby: I could ride to Portland and halfway back, but if something went wrong, it'd take an hour to get a ride home at least
• Not boring: Doing a ten mile loop near your home five times is ridiculously boring
• Refuelling spot: ideally, a small store to get water/snacks would be handy

Yesterday I rode into town to run an errand, headed back out on my normal ~32 mile loop, but I added a 10 mile hillclimb loop. By the end, it was 47 miles and took three hours to complete, but I was never more than 10-15 miles from my house if anything went wrong. Additionally, I forgot to grab my tube/CO₂/lever repair bag and I didn't take any food with me after eating a big breakfast. I dressed warmly since it was about 42F and my two bottles (one water, one tea) lasted for the full trip. It was the longest solo ride I've done and I (luckily) made it back with zero tools, food, or support (the refueling spot I use in the summer is closed for winter).

Overall, I'm happy to have conquered this milestone in just the first two weeks of the year -- it's something I was worried about planning and wondering if I could do it week after week by myself, but now that I've done it, it'll be mentally much easier to do in the future.

Posted on January 15, 2009 in training

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