Thursday, August 21, 2008

Wednesday Night Weirdness

As I mentioned the other day, Coach Dave has scheduled all my workouts up until a few days before the DINO 6/12/24 hour race. Things are looking pretty good, because its about as close to the perfect "get back into shape and try to save the end of the season" plan as I can imagine. It starts off very easy, with each week increasing in volume and intensity. Sundays are long and moderate/hard to get ready for the 12 hour, but the weekdays are pretty kind so that I'll be able to recover. For example, this week had my usual Monday off, then easy 45 minute spins on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. My only "hard" workout for the week was a 1.5 hour group ride last night.

For my group ride, I made another attempt Wednesday Night Worlds. It was a little strange because the ride started out relatively easy. I had to push to stay on a few times due to the yo-yo effect of riding at the back of the pack, but most of the time the pace was comfortable even for me. Then the group spontaneously turned back toward town after only 35 minutes and broke out in a superfast pace line. I didn't even get a chance to tack on, much less get dropped. It turns out they have a loop they use for crit practice out there that I didn't know about.

After separating from the group, I just headed home because I wasn't really feeling it anyway. I was still tired from the race on Sunday and I found it really hard to get into the idea of a group ride since I'm not going to be doing it every week. There's too much of a learning curve involved (last night as an example) for me to do well just randomly showing up once in while. I'm not saying I won't do it again; I'm just saying last night wasn't the night for it and I'm cool with that.

The rest of the week should be good since I'm just riding short and easy every day until Sunday, which is a two-hour "race simulation" with up to four hours of total riding if I feel okay. I'm hoping to go ride at Town Run Park, the venue for the next DINO race, while Adam races a crit in Indianapolis. I'm thinking if I can get in three laps hard and three laps easy, that should be a good start for my 12 hour training.

No comments: