Time for another training update. As you can probably tell, I've gotten out of the habit of regurgitating my weekly riding stats every Monday morning. This was both out of laziness, out of consideration for those who probably don't really wish to read it anyway, and because the 24-hour race really kind of screwed things up the past couple weeks. When I say it screwed it up, I mean that in a good way. On the one hand, needing to taper for it and then recover from it allowed me to take a nice two week sojourn and just sort of ride when I wanted to and/or at least not as hard. I think this will go a long way towards keeping me from burning out by August. Also, the 24-hour race was yet another example that my conditioning is coming along very well and that the hard work is paying off. So I've stepped it back a bit since that race.
For those wondering how I went about tapering for the 24-hour race, here's what I did leading up to the event.
05-19: 100 miles, road bike
05-20: 85 miles, road bike
05-21: recovery day
05-22: 10 miles singletrack, social
05-23: recovery day
05-24: 13 miles doubletrack, social
05-25: 15 miles race course pre-ride, social
and then I raced from noon on Saturday till noon on Sunday.
Although I felt pretty good during the race, my knees started to hurt quite a bit on the drive home. They didn't want to bend anymore; they had had enough. Actually, whatever position they were in was fine, so long as I didn't try to change it. I woke up Monday morning intending on going for a light spin just to loosen things up, but I actually felt much better on Monday. Just a little muscle tightness, so rather than ride, I just spent some time stretching and felt better. Here's how I spent last week following the 24-hour race.
05-28: recovery day
05-29: recovery day (unintentional)
05-30: 26 miles of doubletrack and singletrack, moderate pace
05-31: 23 miles of hilly doubletrack, moderate pace
06-01: 20 miles of hilly doubletrack and singletrack, social
06-02: recovery day
06-03: 28 miles of hilly doubletrack and singletrack, moderate to fast pace
I rode with my TR partner Brett on Sunday and did a ride I like to call "Ridge to Ridge" that is an out-and-back from Snoqualmie Ridge and over to the Grand Ridge trail. I hadn't done the ride in several months for one reason or another, but it was interesting to see that under the same light to moderate effort, Brett and I made it to the High Point parking lot in just 45 minutes, compared to the 55 minutes it took the last time I did it. Same course, same effort, ten minutes faster! Now that's progress!
I haven't ridden yet this week. I had the CK hubs on my 29er wheels serviced and had the bottom bracket and cranks inspected (some creaking going on) and it's been raining on and off all week. Not that either of these things are an excuse to not ride, but rather I know from in the past when training really hard for a late-summer event, I do run the risk of burning out by July. I don't want that to happen this year so I've purposely been taking a couple extra days off this week and just vegging on the couch (playing mad quanitities of Xbox if you must know) to both reduce the chance of burnout and to also make sure I am fully recovered from the Spokane race and ready to bounce back for the Test of Endurance 50-miler I'm doing down in Oregon this weekend. I'm riding tonight, for certain, then it's down to Oregon with Brett Saturday morning for what should be a pretty epic day on Sunday. 50 miles and over 7,000 feet of vert! Whoo-hoo!
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