T45 - Glad I Cleaned My Bike - Swim/Bike

Gainesville

This workout was supposed to be a swim/bike brick, preferably in open water. Well, lacking any sort of large, swimmable bodies of water around here the open water part was out. And the pool here at Jefferson is too small to train in, and I don't know of any good rides near GHFC. So, in short, no brick. Though I think in the fall if I have a day with nothing to do and a longer one of these, I may do the 3 hour sdrive down to Ft. DeSoto in St. Petersburg, just for shits and giggles.

Swim - 1000m continuous

2 Lipodrene
I headed out early today to try and leave the afternoon free for drinking or doing whatever since I was taking Saturday as a rest day. Got to the pool, and even without a warmup I was able to swim this strongly. I didn't time myself, which I need to start doing, but I felt like I was pushing through pretty much the whole way. Definitely one of my best continuous swims. I only hope I can keep a pace like this in my first race in August.

Bike - 2 Hours

1 Lipodrene

It was probably 45 minutes between the end of my swim and the time I got on the bike, so I can't really qualify this as a brick. I took a gel before I left, and had 2 more for the ride. I decided to try and use Trevor's suggestion of riding like I was training with him, and was able to keep that pace pretty well, maybe 40 seconds slower to the point we turned around. I got past that about a half a mile, and my computer decides to go out. Basically, the eye on the wheel gets knocked off line, and all of a sudden I have no speed and no clock. And it's hard to push your speed when you don't know what your speed is. So I pull over and attempt to realign it, and just as I do, I feel the rain start coming down.

Nothing is fucking better, I might add, than spending an hour cleaning your bike with cleaners and q-tips, really getting all the sand out of it, and then having the rain just dump on you the NEXT FUCKING DAY. So not only did my computer go out, the rain was coming down and filthying up my pristine bike. And, of course, it was the first time I"d been caught in the rain on the bike all year. Fuck. I finally got the eye lined up again, and kept a good pace down to the end of Hawthorne. Although the rain did slow me down. I made it down averaging 18.9, in just over 57 minutes. And, some little kids on bikes decided they wanted to pass their sister on the trail just as I was hunkering down to the finish, and I had to swerve onto the dirt/mud to avoid them. I would have crashed were this a year ago, but fortunately I was ok.

I went to ride back and the rain hit me again, considerable slowing me down. Then I got to the big hill in the hammock and decided to try out the small ring as Trevor had suggested. The guy has given me a ton of good training advice over the years, but I can safely say I am not a fan of the small ring. I felt like I wasn't using any less energy than in the big ring, and I was going slower. So, basically, same output with a worse result. I may try it again on a day when I don't have a bunch or other aggravations and my attitude is a little better, but I was disappointed to have only made it back in 2:01. 4 minutes longer than it took me to go down, and my final average speed was 18.4. So I lost a lot of speed coming back.

Not all rides will have this many aggravations, and hopefully I can continue to build on the speed from earlier in the week.