A Great Weekend Of Riding

I am feeling pretty good right now .  The reason is that I had a great weekend of riding.  My body is definitely fully recovered from last week’s century and I am ready to start training for the next long ride.

On Saturday I went out and rode a fairly hard 21 miles, making sure to push the pace up the hills.  My legs had lots of snap in them and my heart rate for any given power output was in line, not inflated like it is when I am tired.  The weather was great and the sun was shining as I pulled up to our garage at the end of the ride and I poured a big heaping glass of chocolate soy milk.  I averaged a little over 18mph for the ride and had an average power output of just over 210 watts, right in my training sweet spot.  I was looking forward to Sunday where I hoped to get at least 50 miles in.  By Saturday afternoon, Sunday looked  like it might be a washout.  We were having a large weather front coming through and heavy rain was predicted for  7-11AM.  I went to bed with rain and wind outside.

My alarm went off at 6AM and I got up to check the weather.  The radar showed that the rain had mostly passed and it didn’t look like any more would come along.  I got ready to go and headed out to the usual meeting spot, about two miles away.  When I got outside the roads were still pretty wet but the rain had stopped.  Nobody else showed up, so I went by myself.  The weather improved each minute and within a 1/2 hour the roads were pretty much dry.  I decided to do an extension of one of our usual routes and ended up with 55 miles by the time I got home at 10AM.  I felt great the entire ride.  I didn’t check my average speed at all during the ride, I just rode and kept an eye on the total miles ridden.  I let my body tell me when to push and when to ease up.  When I got home and checked the Powertap file I learned that I averaged 18.5mph with an average HR of 139 and average power of 215 watts. 

With the good solid weekend rides I ended up with 108 miles for the week, right back on track for 100+ miles/week through the Summer.  My body is back to normal and I am looking forward to this coming week’s rides.