Thursday, March 31, 2011

3/31 - easy half bayway

30 miles with the group from San Mateo to work. Felt pretty easy and breezy.
Hoping to go uphill on Friday.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

3/30 - short easy rides

Feeling tired which is good.

Short rides to and from train stations, and going out this PM to ride with the wife and tow Liam along in the trailer. Perfect. Strangely it adds up to probably 25+ miles.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Tuesday 3/28 - Skyline

Did a reasonable ride on Skyline today. I really felt quite good. And we went pretty hard. 55 miles with 3k of climbing in 3.5 hours. There was only one real specific hard effort on a strava segment - the Hillsborough rollers segment, a series of rollers gaining 185 net feet over 2.4 miles.

I went to the front on the segment and felt pretty frisky so I pushed the pace. Towards the end, Peter Chang went by on the last tough roller (on his fixie) and I gave a shot at holding his wheel but had to stick to a rhythm. There is a T stop sign that would typically just be run, but Peter had to stop watching a car turning left onto Skyline, and we had to stop and regain momentum. I ended up 9 seconds off my PR despite this - but the PR was done sucking wheel, not leading out. Overall I spent a lot of time in the front and felt great. Good sign.

Tomorrow should be an easy day in general, but will probably be closer to a nonexistent day because I should do some daddy/hubby duty.

Monday, March 28, 2011

Monday 3/28 Base Bayway

Actually been riding a bit. Going to start trying to put snippets up.

So far this year 1483 miles per strava, not including random unrecorded commutes.
57,335 feet of climbing - a ratio that is pretty low compared to "back in the day" because most of my riding is commutes that are either completely flat, or with just a couple of small climbs/rollers. Still, this is some pretty decent stuff.

In late Jan early Feb I managed some 200 mile weeks. This slowed down with various pressures at home/work plus a lot of precipitation. Maybe for the best, to take some rest. I feel like I've plateaued a bit despite having dropped another 5 pounds to 195, a number seen only once since I left college - in 2003 I got down to 191 and did a 20:41 OLH. It's hard to measure, I will go out and feel like I really nailed a certain small climb, then the GPS would later tell me "not really". But climbs like Polhemous can be subject to things like headwinds more than sheltered steeper climbs. And it's harder to really ramp it up when it's 48 degrees and sort of crappy. I'm definitely riding a lot faster than 12 months ago.

One thing that sort of makes the slog feel harder is that the SF2G rides have really turned into all out hammerfests with very strong riders - several riders have been placing in NorCal road races - including ones like the Early Bird RR with substantial climbs. So it's hard to feel upbeat when you are always getting your ass handed to you. But then you look at the logs and - "Hey, that was pretty damn fast no wonder it felt so hard".

Anyway, got out this AM about 5 minutes late and missed the train. Rode the 53 miles into work along the flat bayway, made a half hearted attempt to see if I could catch the group but it was not to be. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and am hoping to escape for one of the two planned climbing routes on the docket.

The weight loss has been attributable to one thing, pretty much - I gave up Soda Jan 1 - that's a lot of useless calories not in the system. Maybe when I really want to go after an effort I'll have a Coca-Cola and see how my body reacts to an unusual dose of caffeine and HFCS.