Suckaz!

While you were working, I spent the day riding with KenBob and MrSmith. We did the Loop of Lusty Libations, but sadly the only libations we really got into were sports drinks, some milk, Cokes and water. The C&O was a little muddy and quite wet on the way up to White's Ferry. This made for herky-jerky cycling, with constant slowdowns and accelerations as the mud clung to tires. KenBob had discussed putting on 700x25 slicks, but I talked him back from the edge last night, with the help of a power outage, and he rocked the cross knobbies. Good call! I surfed the muddy gravel with 700x28 Armadillo commuter tires, and other than weighing about 50 gajillion ounces each, which slows accelleration, they held up fine and rolled smooth on the W&OD on the way back. I noticed that 80% of my work (Kcal) occurred on 35 miles of trail, and the remaining 50 miles of riding only accounted for 20% of my work, thanks to drafting and not having to grind along through the puddles. Elsewhere, the ride was a very steady L2 pace, but on the trail... well, the stochiastic effect of mud puddles on the C&O Canal path has been noted previously...

Stoked... But Not Stochiastic

As evident from the pictures, we got a little dirty. So'd the bikes. It was good fun, more work on the way out than you'd think, less work on the way in than you'd expect. We did stop for an impromptu 11:00 AM snack in Sterling, with me downing a quarter pound hotdog and MrSmith whacking a sausage & egg biscuit, to KenBob's bemusement. I also raided the dill pickle tray at the condiment stand, scarfing down as many of them as I thought would fit, despite MrSmith's admonishment that dill pickles are "basically cucumbers soaked in EVIL!" Fair enough, but it sure was some tasty, salty and I suspect kosher evil. Real food is always better than endurance junky food if you're riding more than a couple hours.

The last half hour or so of the ride was tough. I'd told the boys it would be a bit more than five hours, but would ride more like seven. Sure enough it did, and a couple of us got hot feet, and any sort of slowing down prompted major sweating and roasting thanks to heat radiating off the W&OD. Still, it was a great, great base ride with a couple teammates and good friends, and I will call it Mission Accomplished, despite the dubious political connotations associated with that term.

Bottom line: 5:31 riding time, 85 miles, avg. Hr 130 (perfect), avg power 180, NP: 214 (perfect), TSS: 230, Kcal: 3521, IF: .66 (tad low, but in range in light of the distance). Very good ride all around. Cruising speed on the C&O was around 14 MPH, and that's a steady L2 workout. We could have gone 1-2 MPH faster at that effort level were it dry. Conclusion: if you need to knock out a few hours of L2, you could do worse than riding to Whites Ferry and back from D.C.

Smile if you're burping hot dogs and dill pickle!

Comment: You may have noticed that some of my workouts have moved around a little bit. I'm still sticking to the Carmichael Endurance Block volume and most of the schedule. He does advise to be flexible about rest, so I figured if I moved a rest day up (yesterday) and switched a possible rest / 2 hour ride (tomorrow) with Sunday's 4 hour suffer fest, it'd be cool. That what I did, and I'll come out of the regime with all the volume, pretty much right in the zones that Carmichael prescribes. So yeah, I'm sticking to it, and those red "X'es" are all being earned. I'm definitely feeling a lot stronger but also somewhat fatigued. Next week is going to be a bee-hatch.