Friday, May 11, 2007

MOM training ride notes

Did the first 85 miles of the MOM course with John.
Hot with temps in the upper 80s.

This course eats away at you in small bites and then takes some big chunks out of you with John's Creek Mountain and the grunt climbs on clover Hollow. The last climb up Mountain Lake pretty muchs chews you up and spits you out. On this ride we did everything except the last 13 miles.

The profile of the course is very deceiving. The bulk of the elevation gain occurs in small chunks throughout the course.

2 pbj sandwiches
1 cliff bar
+50oz water in camel back.

At store spent 8$ on food. More than what it costs to feed the family off the dollar menu at Wendy's.
60oz water
50 oz gatorade
2 packages of Brown sugar poptarts
Payday bar

Ate/drank almost everything priot to getting to the car before the Clover hollow loop (only had the pop tarts left)

On the clover hollow loop had almost 2 small bottles of Energy drink.

Just riding along wasn't too bad. But with Massanutten on my mind I hit the Johns creek climb really really hard. The legs felt like they were going to cramp so my premise was that the farther up I make it before the cramp, the less walking I'd have to do.

I was so close to hurling when I got to the top. The goal was to create the same feeling that I have in mountain bike races. At the top however, I was questioning this move as there was still a significant amount of riding to go including the meat grinders of clover hollow.

On 42 I was able to recover while the diesel pulled and the wind wasn't too bad. Clover hollow was a last opportunity to really hurt. Again the goal was to hit it really hard and just pay the price later. I never seem to train harder than I race. Today was about as close as I've gotten to changing that.

One thing I realized is that this ride is going to be hard but if I don't throw down any hero cards like today except for the last climb than it won't be too bad. As long as I drink enough and eat enough and don't go hard except at the end we'll be ok.

Also without SportLegs I would be in a ditch somewhere. 5 at hour 1.5hrs, 5 at 2.5hrs, 3 (dropped 2 while riding AGHHH) at 3.5hrs. Another 5 at 4.5hrs. 3 after I finished the ride for recovery. They may put me in the poor house but at least I'll go without cramping.

The legs had that tender feeling from the lock up cramps that occured last weekend at Douthat. But they didn't cramp. The first hour was difficult to get going but after that I felt pretty darn good.

My speculation is that I'm on the upswing of a recovery cycle. About 11 days prior I'd had a hard road ride followed by a hard interval workout. I think that I might not have been fully recovered when at the Douthat Race.

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