That Hurt

Let the training begin. As I have said before, I simply can not believe how quickly the 2013 race season is approaching and how I seem to find myself behind in preparation. It feels like the proverbial bad dream where you wake up the morning of a deliverable, realizing that you have forgotten to start let alone complete it. Funny though, from what I am seeing, I don't seem to be the only one that missed the memo.

For as early and intense as last year's training start was for everyone, primarily due to the lack of winter, this year seems to be the exact opposite. Many people really haven't been riding their bikes at all. For me, I have been riding the whole time, it was simply that my plan was cyclocross specific and included mostly shorter, more intense sessions. It is only the past couple of weeks that I've started to really tack on the miles, getting back up over 200 miles a week. In fact, the ride that we did this past Saturday, a reasonably sane four and a half hours with most of the folks on the newly consolidated Bikeway Source/Bell lap Racing team, was probably the longest ride that I had done since August, nearly six months ago.

Last week team-mate and ride buddy Kyle and I hammered out the first fast and hard two hour road ride of the season. Last night Keith joined us and we extended the loop a bit and got in a brutally hard attack on the slightly modified to add a couple really punchy hills, Turkey Vulture's Revenge ride. We stayed together for the first half but whittled down to two after the new hill additions. I got in a solid hour of zone 3 and another hour of zone four with a few minutes hitting zone 5, which I suspect was gated by the lack of recovery. My legs were screaming the last hour as were my knees from pushing so hard to try and maintain the power and speed. We played off from each other and didn't hold anything back trying to keep the pace high. We finished with over 47 miles and a solid average speed. Not too bad on fully fendered cyclocross bikes, albeit  running road tires.


So the first race that I am currently registered for is Battenkill. We have a team of three of us, Kyle, Mike H. and I, heading out to compete in the master's 45+ race on Saturday. This will be the first time that I have really had a team, although Ben and I raced it last year. That race is just about six and a half weeks away. Not much time to cram for it but I'm certainly going to try. I'm really hopeful but we will have to see how it goes. I'm thinking that I may hit the Burlingame MTB TT that is coming up in a few weeks just to see how that goes. It should be good if I still have some short-fast cyclocross fitness left from the race season. It will also be a chance to try the Cannondale Scalpel 29er that Cathy got me for Christmas. I still haven't had a chance to ride it on dirt yet.