Burnout, Big Time

So I haven't updated since the French Broad....

I kept doing the Northside ride Tuesday and Thursday, and slowly started hurting more and more. Long story short, I decided to take a vacation from the bike after being shelled from the ride last Tuesday's ride (2 Tuesdays ago). I've been overtrained since mid-July I think.

Anyway, I'm going for a ride a little later today that will be my first time on the bike in over a week. We'll see how it goes.

Burnout

What a change from last Tuesday, when I felt on top of the world. Thursday's Northside was tough for me - I contested a lot of the sprints and did more than my share of the work. By the end of the ride I was pretty cooked, and had to take myself out of the rotation after almost taking out my own front wheel twice. I bailed on the Friday ride - I could tell I needed a couple of days off to recover.

Friday I took it easy - stayed completely off the bike. My stomach had been bothering me for reasons unknown for a couple of days. I did get over to Cycles de Oro and ordered SRAM Rival, which should be here Thursday!

Saturday I did the Red, White and Blue ride out of Hagan Stone Park. The ride started early, and I did not eat enough beforehand - rode over there, too. I met up with Will Shore and a couple of other guys and we decided to do the 70 mile route. About 25 miles in I was having trouble holding Will's wheel (well, pretty much everyone's wheel) and knew something was wrong with me. I bailed on the way back and cut it short to about 50 miles total. I bonked pretty hard coming back in. The main problem on this ride was I just could not injest and absorb enough food to dig myself out of the caloric hole I was in, in addition to feeling like absolute shit. Lesson learned: don't plan to get on the bike less than an hour after getting up - my body needs more time to get my metabolic engine fired back up.

So I plan to go very easy this week. Will probably skip the Northside ride and do just enough easy riding to keep my legs from going nuts. I have been eating insane amounts of food this weekend, so I might not have been eating enough these past couple weeks when I've been going hard. I've also felt really tired, despite getting plenty of sleep each night. My legs feel weak and "dead", so all signs are pointing to taking an easy week.

In other news, I decided a couple weeks ago to strip and repaint my fixie. Originally I planned to just repaint it black, but after stripping the frame I decided the brushed aluminum look was so pretty to leave most of the frame bare. This weekend I got all of the painting done. It looks really good. The painted parts (the headtube and a few inches of the adjacent top and down tubes, and the rear dropouts and a few inches of the stays) got 3 coats of primer, with spot sanding in between, then 3 coats of high gloss black paint. The brushed alu sections were sanded with around 400 grit paper, then cross-sanded to give it a brushed look. It came out really well. Then the whole bike was given 3 to 4 coats of clear coat, to protect the bare aluminum and the paint. After the paint fully cures later this week, I will take some 800 grit paper to it, then polish it. It's going to look very nice when I build it back up.

Rest Day

As predicted in my last post, 200 miles a week is a tad much for me, so I took the day off.

Yesterday I posted some solidly good, but not spectacular numbers: going hard (Z4) into a headwind on the aero bars I was averaging something like 22-24 mph - which is good, but nothing to write home about. I also felt a lot more tired at the end of the 25 miles than I should have. This, combined with the "dead legs" feeling during the ride, and very draggy afterwards, gave me a pretty good indication that it was time to take a day off.

Yesterday afternoon I went over to my aunt and uncle's house to work on some bikes they had gotten hold of. Mostly it was little stuff like adjusting the brakes and derailleurs, but my uncle had an old mountain bike that needed a crankset.

This morning I swung by REI and picked up a new rear rack for my commuter bike. For Christmas I got a set of Axiom Typhoon panniers, which are terrific. But, the rack I had was pretty terrible and not really designed to carry large panniers. The worst problem was my heels didn't clear the panniers, which would typically eject one of them every time I rode - really irritating.

So, I got a longer rack that holds the panniers a solid 2 inches or so further aft. It's also a much nicer rack overall, and has a mounting point for a tail light on the rear of the rack. This makes me irrationally happy.

Tonight, as a shakedown run, I distributed fliers around campus advertising the cycling team's first meeting. Everything worked flawlessly! It's so much nicer to have the bike carrying stuff instead of your back.

I think my commuter has a bit of water in the stem interface, because when I stand to climb the bars make this horrible click when I pull on them. And it's not the headset - I made sure of that. At some point I'll have to tear the front end down and dry it out.... a task I'm not relishing because the bike has a threaded headset.

Burn that Turkey

By the numbers:

Distance: 53.6 miles

Average speed: 19.1 mph

Duration: less than 3 hours

This was a fun, but painful ride.  We had a really strong group for the 50 mile ride: several Masters racers, and a couple cat 2 riders, among a generally very strong bunch.  The weather was beautiful, high 50s with a sub-10 mph headwind and a little cloud cover.  This time of year, it doesn't get much better than that.

We rolled out a little late, taking is easy as everyone got warmed up and got stratified according to their speed and distance.  About 4 miles in, after we had gotten rid of most of the slow folks and the shorter distance riders, one of the Masters racers puts the hammer down for a few miles.  Being the idiot I am, I was right on his wheel chasing him up a hill, thinking he was going to let up at the top. 

As it turns out that was his way of getting the pace elevated: for the 3 miles he went hard, we spent the next 10 or so absolutely flying along at 23+ most of the time, in a double paceline.  After a little break for a few miles the pace climbed again, and I got my first pace of a rotating double paceline - there are several subtleties that no one mentions on the internet, and it was hard to keep going in a group that had not trained or ridden together before - gaps would develop, and people didn't rotate back onto the pulling line.  

Anyway, I managed to hang on to mile 30, when I realized the pace wasn't going to slow down again.  At about this point I ran out of gas, figuratively speaking.  I had food with me, but I couldn't get it down fast enough and ride at 25 mph at the same time.... something to practice I guess.  Me and two other guys who had also gotten dropped stuck together and made it in, at a much slower pace than the main group.  

By mile 35 I was in bad shape: my butt was really not thrilled with several high-mileage successive days on the bike, and was letting me know in no uncertain terms.  My 200+ mile week was also catching up with me - my legs felt dead, making it up hills was difficult.  Somehow though, we made it back.  

So I'm taking the next 2 days completely off.  This week (the past 7 days), I've done 210 miles, which is the most I have every done in a week.  Since I essentially went from 20 mile weeks to a 200 mile week, there is a pretty high risk of overtraining.  So... no bike for a few days, to give my butt (and the rest of me) a chance to recover.  Over-extending yourself is a valid training technique, but you need time to recover and repair afterwards.