LOL...don't misinterpret my headline. But this is a very hard time to be a serious triathlete in DE/NJ. At this point, the smart money says that the weather just plain sucks. Another six inches to remove on Tuesday morning. I hate my treadmill and even my Computrainer is looking less sexy these days.
Still--I've found in my ten TRI years that if you can scoot by this late winter period (and late Feb is the worse of it mentally) then as the weather brightens in March (and then glorious April!) motivation builds as you run in shorts and bike in something less than 15 pounds of clothes....heck, even swimming in the pool is better. If you can just stay the course in the bleakness then you can get to good fitness by May--even in the mid-Atlantic.
That's then and this is now--a time for the "Hard Men" of triathlon to show up and get it done. As I mentioned, my legs are fried but today there was a little "break" in the weather and I jumped outside to do my 67+ mile standard course under grey clouds, 20+ mph winds and 40 degree weather.
I've done 6-7 of these rides since starting serious triathlon operations again--all of them in the spirit of just getting out there for 3.5-4 hours and building my endurance. Today i decided (despite my legs) that it was time to start building some quality into my long rides. I dusted of the BMC TT01--it's first ride since Kona--and went at it for 67.4 miles. Today was all in my mind--push, push, push. I was moderately successful but did take a full 20:30 off of the time I recorded for the same course last week. Of course some of this is due to the TT setup but in fairness to the driver, I was THERE for a fair amount of this ride.
Not to get carried away with things--I'm a good 20 minutes slow for this effort relative to a solid nice day in July (with little wind) effort and probably 30 minutes away from a half IM race level effort but today was a BIG step forward for a very old guy with very tired legs in crappy weather.
This has been my strength in the past and it showed up (a little anyways) today!
Ever upward!
No comments:
Post a Comment