Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Seeing Results

Today I got in a 25 mile ride in our bizarre weather: overcast, 65+ deg., and blowing 20+ mph out of the south.

Distance: 25.7 miles
Average Speed: 18.8 mph
Duration: 1:22

Now these might not seem like impressive numbers, but they don't tell the whole story.  For most of the outbound leg (heading south), I was not pushing hard.  When I started paying attention to speed after about 8 miles, I was doing 20-23 mph with a quartering crosswind for most of the ride.  With about 3 miles to go I started cooling down, average speed at this point was 19.0 mph.  

Again, that might not seem impressive, but my best ever 25 miles, on a much flatter loop and in absolutely perfect conditions, was 20.0 mph at the beginning of last summer.  The fact that I averaged 19 mph in much less than ideal conditions, in the off season, feels very, very good.

This ride has shown me that my power output is way up, along with my distance.  My gut feeling up to this point is that my endurance had come way up, but my output had dropped off.  This ride shows this is not the case.

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