Chain Reaction Shop Ride, 7/7/11

My wife has been out of town for 2 weeks so I didn't get a ton of riding in lately. The first week I managed a few rides down to SSF or Belmont at snail's pace, having had enough trouble getting my son to daycare that I missed all the rush hour Caltrains and had an hour to burn. The second week I did almost no riding other than my typical commute, sneaking in only a trip to Los Altos to pick up my AV kit and getting a quick spin through Rancho San Antonio and going up Mora Trail (steep!)

I did get some good riding in on a Sonoma weekend in between her two weeks, doing 2 rides with my buddies. I decided that I would not attack unless attacked, and then I'd see what I could do. I felt *very* comfortable - amusing given I am always feeling dread on the SF2G rides which have gotten harder and harder and harder. On the small climb up Canyon Road @BOORider put in a dig to give some guff to a triathlete who was weaving across the road in his aerobars, I followed and was really feeling not too bad. Then Troy cracked, and I decided to see what I had left. Amazingly, my legs responded. Not bad.

The next day we went up Mill Creek Road and I had a similar strong day on that climb, including the super steep section at the top.

This week, I was able to get some riding in. I did a set of small hills on Tuesday - Jefferson/Page to Moody/Mora/Mt Eden. I did try to push the Jefferson climb and came up 3 seconds shy of the PR. Somewhat annoying since that was set the day before the Hamilton climb and I've been doing a lot of riding. Within the Strava Error seen on Dan's blog, but still frustrating. Then again I was going from a couple of weeks off.

One thing that's been interesting about this year's training, is that while various climbs I do have allowed me to track progress on PR's via Strava, I don't have a lot of comparison to previous periods of personal fitness. I have several sheets of paper in a box that have the PR's from the 2000-2003 era, where I was making steady progress before various life events slowed things down. But I hadn't really climbed any of those climbs other than the one OLH I did a few months back that showed me I was doing "OK". And that was done on a day I felt very very tired.

So this AM, I went on the CR Shop ride that goes up Kings Mtn. I hadn't been up Kings in the last couple of years. The climb seemed very very long - it's a lot longer than the climbs I typically do (Jefferson, John Daly to Highway 1 merge, Polhemous). I started out on the wheel of the shop owner's son Kevin, the shop blog seemed to indicate that Kevin was a negative splitter which might just be what I wanted to do. But about 1/4 of the way up I went ahead and rode past him - he dropped out of sight for a bit but lo and behold he was maybe 5 seconds behind me at the top.

Anyway, got to work and did the download. 28:28 from Tripp to the top. I was pretty sure that was in the range of my old PR. Got home, pulled out the old sheets of paper, dug around, and saw that my old PR was... 28:28. I think I could go faster, we started pretty slow. For reference in the same month as that PR, I did my OLH PR of 20:41.