Saturday, December 12, 2009

valuable lessons learnt this morning

Learnt some very valuable lessons today on my morning ride. the basics of the situation are that i went on a 30 mile ride this morning with some guys that my tri club coach said will help me pick up some speed as they are pretty quick riders. Turns out she was right. You know that you are in trouble when you are doing 28mph going down a hill and they are leaving you in their dust. Lucky for me that was the only downhill that they did that to me, but it was more the uphills that were the problem.

So you might be asking about those lessons and basically i have an idea that i would like to Complete a 70.3 distance bike leg at 21mph. if the conditions are good for speed that would probably put me in the top 10. Naturally i would have to kill in the swim and run as well. As i am not running at the moment i am concentrating on my swim and bike training.

So the lessons would be that i have a long way to go. I definitely need to work on my leg strength as i sucked on the hills. I dont think it was to bad though as we were slowed down by a few traffic lights and we still finished the 30 odd miles at 19mph. It is great interval training though riding with them as you are pretty much sprinting at 20/25mph on the flat sections and they were probably averaging 15/20 mph up the hills. me on the other hand was probably averaging 10/15mph up those same hills.

The fact that i had a big gym workout on wednesday and did 57 miles on thursday probably didn’t help me any either. Thats what im telling myself anyway. So for the weeks to come im going to try and get into the gym as much as possible and work on strengthening my legs. if i can get 100 miles in on the bike a week would also be great and i definitely want to join the speedsters on the weekend for interval training.

ive got a lot of work to do, got my body fat down to 16.8 % and want to get my diet back in check as well. During the wife's pregnancy we let that slip a little and we are getting back into our routine of eating. I thought it was pretty funny, we were filling out the baby book last week and there is a section in it where you fill in how much weight daddy put ON during the pregnancy, lucky for me we had to scratch out PUT ON and fill in LOST and it turned out to be 10 pounds......

4 comments:

  1. Those are always tough rides. I beat myself up and end up suffering more mentally than physically. Glad to hear you were able to stick with them!

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  2. It's always great to train with people faster than you because you just kill it to try to hang on. Cheers to hanging on and getting to hang with the big boys. I feel ya.

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  3. Funny - weight lost! Wow that's impressive! As for the bike, make the sure the weekly miles work for you vs. just being miles.

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