RIDE BETA
If you don't get out and take advantage of the days like we had in the Bay Area on Sunday. 75, sunny, legwarmers required for the Golden Gate Bridge crossing, as usual, but otherwise spectacular and nothing wrong with riding through a Princess Mononoke mist over one of the coolest visual landmarks in America. Just another day in the saddle. I hit it hard, hard, hard all week and on Saturday as well leaving me a bit shattered on Sunday.
The legs said no and rest was probably in order, but there's no way I was passing up riding on a day like this. That's the beauty of knowing your body inside out—I knew pushing it today would be pushing myself to the brink of overtraining, but I also knew just how hard I could go, what I could and couldn't do if I didn't want to spend the next three days being incapable of doing any physical activity except napping and shoveling food in my face.
Got out and spent the first 40 minutes of the ride spinning at a high cadence very easy with my bro and L. MIN 40: stopped at pull-up bar/rings at Crissy field and knocked out 35 pull-ups, 35 push-ups in two sets.
From there, back on bike, headed towards Golden Gate bridge. Quick 2-minute power climb up to the Bridge, then headed over to Marin and the climb up into Golden Gate Park.
Got passed by one of the innumerable Cat. IV going pro roadies on the bridge, let him get a 20 meter gap, then spent the rest of the trip over the bridge attacking towards him, drifting back, repeating, to turn the 10 min. ride into a nice, hard interval session with steady LT and brief high cadence bursts to VO2 max for attacks, half dozen in total.
THEN: 8 min.standing high rpm LT climb up GGNP climb towards ridge where I access dirt. The highlight of this climb was starting just in front of a pair of dead serious cyclocross riders on $5,000 bikes who charged past me shortly after I took off.
I was pretty gassed from yesterday and did I mention I was carrying a 20-pound load in my backpack? I'm pretty serious about being prepared for anything on a ride these days following a near death experience in Colorado a few weeks back when I got caught out on a ride without the proper kit (not my fault, I swear). Now I make sure that whatever happens, including totally unexpected weather or getting hurt and having to take care of myself while immobile, I have what I need in the magic bag. The prostate probably doesn't love it—weak stream y'all—but it does make every inch of a ride that much harder.
Suzie Creamcheese and Lance Romance roll past on their badass cx rigs with road wheels/tires and start hauling ass up the climb. Rather than doing structured intervals today, I was up for a more stochastic, uncontrolled experience (in that I selected other riders to chase and use as interval markers rather than saying 'ok I'm going to ride up and down this hill for x number of minutes x number of times—as we all know, it takes a huge mental adjustment to get used to the discomfort of someone else taking a switch to your ass and lighting it up in front of you on the road versus dictating your own pace. It's always harder when someone else is calling the shots, and that's how it goes in every competitive scenario whether it's on a group ride, in a race, on a century, whatever. You don't decide when things get hard. Your environment, the riders around you, tactical considerations, etc. dictate when you have to dig deep—you yourself rarely do. It's one thing to develop an engine that can go full blast for long periods of time whether in 1st gear or 5th, but it's another thing entirely to put that engine into action in a dynamic scenario and to have the fortitude to erase the suffering-induced mental block you will definitely encounter when you're not at the controls of the Stanley Milgram pain dial and it's the guy in the next room/up the road giving you the electro shock, you know).
I was having difficulty generating much power and was pretty much at my limit as far as a sustainable pace for this particular climb, but I said, ah, fuck it, it'll make me tougher and I'll get a more effective ride in if I suck it up and try to stick it to these skinny-tired mofos. So that's what I did.
I slowly cranked up to my maximum sustainable LT seated pace, then when I got within five feet of them soft pedaled a few strokes before blasting past them in a burst that didn't take me to my limit but allowed me to put some distance into them.
Once I came around them, I kept my pace as high as I could and stuck there until I was about 300 meters from the top of the climb when I got out of the saddle and started hauling ass, finishing at the top in a complete VO2 max-level effort, just the icing that really will make your fitness cake taste that much better when it's time to really use it.
Over the top, I caught my breath then bombed (well, slowly picked) my way down a dirt trail into the valley on the other side with views that never disappoint. So nice to get off road, but it's taking a minute to get the dirt skills dialed back in. Also, I like to pump up to about 50 psi for the ride through the city, over the bridge and into Marin, and I don't necessarily want to have to reinflate using a frickin' mini pump later in the ride, so I try to just make due with 50 psi and the minimal tread on my MTB tires once I hit dirt. Sketchy, but it will make it that much easier when I'm in a real dirt scenario, can deflate down to 35 or so psi, what I'd normally ride off road.
Lance Romance stuck with me on the descent for a while, impressive on a cx bike, then I hit the turbo boost and he disappeared.
At the bottom, immediately looped around then grabbed a nice, very hard 15 minute climb back up the dirt and over the spur.
Did another interval over the bridge then stopped again at Crissy Field pull-up bar for more BW work.
Did:
15 pull-ups
15 push-ups
10 pull-ups10 push-ups
Then 50 hanging leg raises w/alternating sets of 10 normal hanging leg raises, 5 rolling inverted leg raises (ouch).
After that, soft pedaled it back to HQ, then did some urban hiking and ran errands for 30.
Training is where you find it.
Drill it.
Typed by thumb, sent via ESP. Follow me at: www.andrewvontz.com, www.drillit.tv, @vontz
www.andrewvontz.com
www.drillit.tv
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