My Last One

In yet another of my favorite sports-themed media items, the book Running with the Buffaloes, there is a chapter called, "It's My Last One, Bitch!" The phrase comes from freshman Steve Slattery's reply when he is chided by the team captain for running too hard during a workout. I'm pretty sure I may have also said it in my head last night when I blew past some soft-pedaling guys who were also doing intervals on Bottom Rd.

Yes, last night concluded my Vo2 build-up for the month with 2 x (2 x 5 min). Despite having lingering fatigue left in my legs from the weekend and the plethora of gnats that kept trying to fly in my mouth and stick to my sweaty arms, I completed the workout in quite a respectable fashion. I averaged 187 for the set and set a new best 5 minute power of 194.

While there's still quite a jump between what one can do for 5 minutes and FTP, last night's workout was getting darn close to the magic number of 200. That's given me extra motivation today since I've been making great progress towards my wattage goal, but I'm still a long way off from the 115 pound weight goal that goes with it. Even with a lot of improvement, I'll still only be able to produce good skinny-girl level power, and I won't be very fast unless I have the skinny girl body to go with it. When I get the urge to eat sugar or other refined carbohydrates, I'm going imagine myself eating up all my power gains along with it.

As for other lasts, I also got my last month of workouts leading up to Pisgah last night. Everything's scheduled except for the last ~10 days of taper. I excited when I saw it, because it's looks like I'm going to get to race a couple of 'cross races and do a couple of Wednesday night 'cross training races.

In general, I'm kind of happy to see that my calendar doesn't have too much of a "OMG, Pisgah!" theme to it. The endurance is interesting: another 3.5 hour "freestyle sweet spot" mountain bike ride (lets see if I can kill this one, too), 6 of the 24 Hours of DINO, and finally a road century a couple of weeks before the race. The road century was 100% Jason's idea, but I kind of like it. I looked on the internet to see if I could find an organized ride that day so that I wouldn't have to be bored and alone, and I think I found a viable option in Very Southern Indiana that looks like fun.

Since the Lumberjack, I've been hesitant to be "OMG, anything", because that was how I was the first half of the season and it ended up being a disappointment. The irony is that Pisgah was supposed to be carrot that kept me training hard through the end of the season, and as it's turned out, it's more like I've been training hard in spite of it, not because of it. Everything that I've done the last two months has been because I'm sick of being slow and I feel like I've been training for some unknown success that's three years in the future or something. Whatever happens in October happens, but as the race gets closer, things are becoming a bit clearer to me: I think it will hurt really bad and that it will be really good for me. I think I'm a little less scared of the ugly place than I used to be.