10 March, 2011

One Day Left!

Today is it.  The culmination of about 9 weeks of heavy lifting.  No more hypertrophy or Muscular strength workouts.  No more 2 reps at 95% 1RM, and I am very glad.



For the last two months just about every entry in my training log has contained "Heavy legs," "Tired legs," "Sore legs," or some other combination therein.  I am hoping that after a week or so, I will start to get some of that "snap" back, a little spring in my step.  Not the feeling I have had lately when I get on the bike of "I wonder how long I can pedal for tonight."

Next week I will then reduce my time in the gym to 1 day a week, doing more endurance type work.  This will go on for a couple months, then I will drop the gym membership for the summer.

I will also start going back towards race weight, and not worry so much about cramming myself full of whey shakes and other protein sources.  No need to continue the caloric excess to build muscle.



I am also anxious to get back to some racing, to see if all this offseason work has produced anything more than lead legs.

It is a couple weeks until Barry-Roubaix, and I am not sure if I am ready.  I have calculated a finishing time between 2.33 and 2.6 hours.  This is based on  last year's performance extrapolated to 35 miles, and last Sunday's ride.  An average of these two numbers gives 2 hours, 28 minutes.  If it were 2010, that would place me at 56th place out of 72 racers.  Certainly nothing to write home about.


That is a picture of my bike after 2.5 hours out on Sunday.  A mix of paved and mud roads.  It took over an hour to get it cleaned up enough to go back inside on the trainer.  I am not sure if that was a good return on investment.


I have purchased a handful of new stuff for this season, so I may begin a (brief) series of unsolicited reviews.  These would be my untrained opinion, and will probably never contain "vertical compliance" of "plushness," unless I was perhaps reviewing some sort of stuffed animal seatbag.

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