Training intensive

I’m still waiting on the final schedule from Lorri, but it’s looking like this will be a week of long rides – 3-5 hours every other day with a day of shorter rides in between.  Since most of these are supposed to be hilly rides, it’s probably going to make for an exhausting week, but one which (I hope!) will really push my training forward.

This week I plan to tackle Mt. Diablo as well as Mt. Hamilton.  Numerous people have told me that Mt. Diablo is nearly a perfect match for Monitor Pass, and now that I have a cycling map to the East Bay I actually feel some confidence about attempting it.  (I do not go cycling anywhere without a map because, as B. can tell you, I have absolutely NO sense of direction and will get lost given any opportunity to do so.)

Still waiting for my GPS unit to arrive.  Amazon shipped it a few days ago, which means it should be arriving any day now – impatient to get going!

I’m getting better at the trainer workouts.  I absolutely hated my first one, which was a series of Zone 5 sprints – 1 minute at full blast, 1 minute recovery, 1 minute max exertion, and so on.  I ran out of energy after the first seven or so sprints and had to gear down and cruise (slowly) through the end of the workout.

This time I was a little better prepared – ate a good, high-carb breakfast and gave myself some time to digest before tackling the trainer.  I managed all ten of the short sprints and three of the five longer efforts (two minutes on, two minutes recovery) before running out of energy.  But this time I enjoyed them instead of hating every minute – I think I’m learning to pace myself, and gear down when I start running out of energy.

I hope the trainer workouts will make me faster.