Blue Ridge Parkway Ride

It seems that everything I add in here relates to biking lately!

After the Silver Comet adventure last week, we undertook something completely different this week.

We went camping at Montebello with the Outdoor Adventure Social Club.

It was a full weekend to celebrate the club's 5th year in existence. There was music (including my tunes on Friday night) and tons of activities.

Amy decided to lead a bike ride. Initially the plan was to do an advanced ride in the morning and a beginner ride in the afternoon. However after scouting out the local roads, we found it would be at least an hour drive (like, in a car) to get to any terrain suitable for a beginner ride, so that plan was scrapped.

I'm going to try and map this route and link to it, but it was pretty ridiculous.

We turned left out of the campground and started straight up a hill for almost 2 miles. I'm sure some people would have loved it, but after an evening of staying up late, poor nutrition and subpar sleep (not to mention alcohol for some of the riders the night before), this was the kind of climb that made many people want to quit. In fact, we had 2 folks drop out after 1.5 miles.

After some sitting and thinking and discussion about turning around and putting the bikes on the car to drive them to someplace more fun (read: easier) to ride, we opted to go ahead and ride to the Blue Ridge Parkway, just to say we got there.

Of course once we got to the parkway, we decided to ride a little more.

This was brutal after the climb just to get there, however, in retrospect, it wasn't quite as bad as I thought at the time. The climbs were longer, but nowhere near as steep.

We rode about 6ish miles to a picnic table and had lunch. It doesn't sound like much, but at this point, we had been on our bikes for about 2 hours!

Then we decided to turn around and head back down. Fortunately, all the climbing we did to get to our lunch spot meant that it was primarily descents to get back to the road to the campground! It took us probably more than an hour to get to the picnic table, and probably about 20 minutes to get back down.

So naturally, after a lunch and a bunch of fast downhill riding (after which we all felt invincible! Note: never plan the rest of your day's biking immediately following long stretches where you don't have to pedal), we figured we needed to get at least 20 miles in.

That decided, instead of turning off to head back to the campground, we went the other direction on the parkway. One guy in our group had a GPS, we found a route that would add a few miles and get us back to the campground.

There was more climbing, but again, it was not severe and actually kind of pleasant (as long as you didn't look too far ahead to see how long the hill lasted!).

We reached our turn off and (incorrectly) calculated that we needed to add about 3 more miles to get to 20, so we kept on, planning to turn around after 1.5 miles.

This was where the highlight (sarcasm) of my day occurred. After doing another little climb and riding about 2 miles, the people in front hit the top of the hill and turned around to head back.

I stopped pedaling and unclipped to take a drink and turn my bike around, but the second I put my foot on the ground and put a little weight on it, but left quad completely cramped up. I couldn't even bend my leg to get off my bike. I had to lay the bike down on the ground, so I could swing my leg off it to sit on the ground. It took several minutes before I could bend my leg, but once that happened, everything was good to go.

I attribute that cramp to my poor nutrition and hydration the evening before. I was wearing my camelbak and had a bottle of gatorade on my bike as well, but that wasn't enough hydration on a hot day (probably close to 90, but for the first time this season, so I wasn't particularly acclimatized to it). Regardless, I'm going to the bike shop after work today to get a second bottle cage and water bottle!

All in all we wound up doing just under 23 miles in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Quite an accomplishment for and overweight, underexperienced (this is only my second year cycling, compared to about 6 years for the next least experiened) rider like myself!

I have to say I was quite proud of finishing that ride, especially considering how badly I wanted to quit at the beginning! One of the other guys really helped my by riding slow along with me and encouraging me to keep going. Doing a ride like that is so psychological, any kind of support you can get helps!

Hopefully I'll get a couple of pictures up soon!

MS 150 Jerseys

This is fun!
One way I raised money for this year’s MS 150 Tour de Vine was offering to put company logos on a custom jersey I would be using.
I actually got a few takers! Here’s the template:


Also, if you'd like to donate, click here to go to my personal page!

Last Weekend

Amy and I did 55 miles on the Silver Comet in GA for her birthday.
The Silver Comet is a rail trail… A long one.
This ride was pretty cool… at first… The trail, at least in the direction we were going sloped just barely downhill on the way out, with an equivalent uphill on the way back. Although I don’t think it’s necessarily accurate to call it a hill!
We split it up and rode about 22.5 miles from Hiram to Rock Mart, then turned around and came back.
The first half of the ride took just about an hour for me to do.
The second half was another story altogether!
It took closer to an 1hr 45 min… My legs were working the whole way, but just barely!
We ate a little lunch then tacked on 10 extra miles and called it a day.
By the way, 55 miles is my longest ride to date.
 

Charlottesville Tri Club

I (very) recently joined the C’Ville Tri Club. My hope is to eventually get into some group training and coaching to help improve myself once I get in better shape and a couple/few races under my belt.

Looks like my timing was very good, as they are currently taking orders for the 2009 kit. Pretty cool!

Now, all that’s left is to lose enough fat to squeeze into the tri top by the time it gets here!

Changing my game up

I realized something the other day… Reading what someone did for training is boring, like 99% of the time.

I no longer want to summarize each pathetic workout on this blog. I already log them over at BT.

So I’m looking more toward using this for stuff that might actually be a little more interesting to people!

Here’s the first item…

I signed up for my very first sprint triathlon recently!

It’s the Power Sprint Triathlon in Richmond on May 31.

This one is supposed to be a good, beginner friendly race. Short pool swim, rolling 12 mile bike course and flat run.

I’m looking forward to my first triathlon experience!

HTFU

I started to blog this last week, but got busy doing other stuff and forgot about it.

First, and most important… I looked at the workouts I was doing and realized they weren’t going to cut it. I eased into training, but now I’m back and I already had a base to begin with, I just needed to uncover it!

Long story short, I realized it was time for me to HTFU (the first definition). I started by heading out for a 5 mile run last week. That was more along the lines of what I need to be doing as a longer run. It took me almost an hour! Anyway, no more of the 30 minute run stuff as a long day. I also need to swim more. I am proud of what I’ve been doing on the bike though…

Here’s to keeping it up!

Yesterday kicked my butt

It was another one of those wake up at 4:30am days, since I had to go all the way from Ruckersville for my workout.

I was scheduled to do 300m swimming, but I would up doing 450m. I have been looking over my TI stuff and felt like I was doing a little bit better and wanted to do some more swimming to see how it felt. I still have to work on breathing, because I feel like my lungs are going to explode, but I think I noticed a small improvement on my strokes and my speed. (Hopefully it was real and not just percieved!)

Then I did a 30 minute workout on the treadmill. I figured since I was inside, I'd try to mix it up a little, and did a rolling hills type interval workout like this:

5 min warm up - speed 5.0 incline 1.0
2 min interval - speed 5.5 incline 2.0
2 min recovery - 5.0, 1.0
2 min interval - 5.5, 3.0
2 min recovery
2 min interval - 5.5, 4.0
2 min recovery
2 min interval - 5.5, 3.0
2 min recovery
2 min interval - 5.5, 2.0
2 min recovery
5 min cooldown - 5.0, 1.0

Slow I know, but I'm working on it!

I don't usually talk about this part of my Tuesday/Thursday, but my karate class was killer today.

Usually we stretch to warm up and do a few of some variety of pushups and situps.

Not yesterday!

We started with some footwork speed drills running around a pad, then we did some plyometric jumping drills over said pad, then we did burpees (with a jump at the end), then we headed over to the bags to do abs. We did 1 min situps (and I should mention that we had to wrap our legs around the bag and touch the back of the bag on the up and the floor behind our heads on the way down to make sure we were actually sitting up and coming back down), 1 min legs raises, 30 second break, 30 seconds of situps/30 seconds of leg raises, 30 second break, 15 seconds of situps/15 seconds of leg raises. This amounted to about 35 minutes of drills/exercises. Tougher than it sounds!

So took a planned early afternoon off and sat on my couch!