Confidence Building

The past couple of weeks I have had some doubts with this whole triathlon ordeal. It had nothing to do with desire. It isn’t even knowing that training is going to gradually take over most of my spare time (spare time? what’s spare time?). I wasn’t intimidated by the swim. The running, well, I am slow but consistent.

What has been weighing on me is the bike. I have never ridden long distances on the bike. Sure, I don’t doubt my ability to ride. I have been, however, concerned with being able to keep up the necessary pace for the longer bike rides. I started out hoping to average 19-20 mph for the bike portion of the triathlon (wishful thinking). Koach Karl says we should average better than 15 mph.

After riding the bike regularly for the past several weeks, I have been averaging just over 15 mph over 15 – 30 miles of riding. This had frustrated me. Not a lot. I am averaging faster than KK says I need to be, but nowhere near the 19-20 mph I had optimistically hoped for.

So Sunday morning, my tri team got together for a group training session. We were doing a double-brick. 20 miles riding followed by 2 miles running. We then got back on the bike and repeated the entire process - 20 more miles on the bike and 2 more running.

I was a little nervous going into training.

So to ease the anxiety, I didn’t get to bed until after 3 am Saturday night/Sunday morning.

I showed up to training tired, on just 3 hours sleep – but hey, at least I didn’t have a hangover.

I got on the bile and rode. Because I am, by nature, an overachiever (or is it a poor listener who has problems following directions), I rode further than I was told to, but still managed to average 16.8 mph. I was quite pleased.

The run was ok. I was tired and had to poop, but kept going anyway.

And then I got back on my bike.

And started riding.

And about the time I got on the 2-laned road without any shoulder to pull off onto and numerous small hills requiring moderate pedaling effort, my right quad locked up.

I may have dropped a couple of f-bombs.

But being an expert on cramps, I can assure you that a cramp in a quad muscle is nowhere near as painful as a calf cramp. So I kept pedaling. The cramp worked itself out. I started feeling good.
Not just kind of good. But really good.
I was pedaling strong with a solid, steady cadence.

I was going fast.

I felt like a real bicyclist!

At one point, I was up over an 18 mph average and would have cleared 17.5 mph average for the entire ride had the wind not picked up and our last 5 miles were more-or-less in a fairly brisk headwind. I still finished the second leg at a 17 mph average.

That’s 0.2 mph faster than my first leg and that is exciting.

Like the first run, the second run wasn’t the best. It was an anticlimactic finish to an otherwise good training session. My quads weren’t that happy about running, though, and threw in a couple of brief cramp sessions on the back mile. And I should have probably run faster as I averaged no better than 12 – 13 minute miles on the run. But that didn’t bug me much. There will be other opportunities to run. I know I can run the 26 miles.

And I am now much more confident I can ride the 112 miles.

Oh, and the reason I didn’t get much sleep on Saturday night was because I went to see a real, live roller derby for the first time in my life. All I can say is wow. I was wound up for hours after in was over. That Snot Rocker is one hell of a skater.