Sweet, blessed rest week.
The land of .64 IF rides... the place where your heartrate only breaks out of zone 1 if you win the Orbea in the local bike shop's raffle. The training sequence that actually makes your legs feel good for a change. Riding with non-racing friends and letting them dust *you* for a change. The one week in four where you can sleep in and skip the 5:30 AM start to training rides. The one week in four where you can stay up and watch television until 11:00 PM without being wiped out the next day. The one week in four where you actually get faster and fresher as the week goes on. The week where your bike gets clean, and stays clean. Where you break out the fixie for fun - and where you don't cry looking at the fixie thinking about the new kinds of agony it's going to inflict on you, because, by God, you're not going to climb any hills on the damn thing. The week where you have time to actually pay your bills. The time where you can actually do your daily stretching routine at night without being so tired that you pass out on the floor.
Rest week.
It's the best thing since lightly chilled Accelerade.
3 comments:
Incredible!
Truly incredible!
It's like that episode of Star Trek where they enter a parallel universe with the evil Captain Kirk and all that jazz.
You Me
North South
Summer Winter
rest week 3 consecutive 60+ mile days
I've decided that the solution to my weight loss plateau is saddle time. So with lectures finished and assignment completion a fairly fluid scenario, I've got basically 6 weeks of unencumbered daylight.
Here's where I'm headed with that. Every day, 100km. That's 42 days yielding a total of over 2600 miles. I put a new pair of Aksiums, tyres, tubes, cluster and chain last Thursday.
I started off with 71km (44mi) Friday as a rest day before the Saturday race. Saturday was 48km (30mi) including a 22km (14mi) crit. Sunday was the first of the 60 milers and I've backed it up with another Monday and another today.
The difference between a hard day and a rest day will be whether I come home with an average heart rate of 115 or 145. Or maybe whether I've rolled down the highway at 22mph or gone and climbed 2 or 3 laps of the 4 mile 10% climb a couple of suburbs over.
No matter what, when I complete that mileage there's no way my weight won't have shifted at least 20 pounds.
You, on the other hand... I'm jealous. A rest week.
Big Mike
Yeah, well, it precedes two months of sprints and high intensity intervals, going into the last six weeks of the season (with several flat crits and flat-ish) road races, and then psycho-cross. So don't be too jealous.
I'm actually a bit jealous of you - that's some good volume there, Mike. Let's see if you can keep it up. My money is on the road kicking your ass, not the other way around. I hope you prove me wrong.
There you go, is that some good refrigerator signage fodder for you?
I've just got out of bed this morning to the sound of pounding rain. Even at 5am the temp is still 64F. If it's still raining this hard at 10am I'll take the fixie out for 40 miles and make up the difference before the weekend.
It's not the actual rain that bothers me, it's a combination of the soggy socks squelching around in the shoes and the deadly pairing of my fogged up glasses sharing the road with kamikaze drivers.
The thing I think will most likely keep me from hitting the goal is if an achilles or patella tendon turns into an ibuprofen vortex. Although given my current motivation I'll probably just McGyver it with a roll of electrical tape and ride through it, all the while screaming at myself like Eric Bana did in Chopper "HARDEN THE F%&K UP". If you haven't seen Bana in Chopper let me know.
Mike
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