The lying B*stard!

Last Friday, June 30th, was another of my "let's see how painful we can make this workout" sessions. I don't know why I pick Fridays to beat myself up so badly. I think it's the thought of the weekend coming up and the weekends are a time to rest and recover. But weekends are the only time where there is a a big enough block of time to get in some really good workouts so I should be resting on Friday in preparation for the big training sessions. But Fridays are close enough to the weekends to make them a part of the weekend so I suppose training hard on Friday night actually makes sense.

The plan was to do a 10+ mile run at a moderate pace, then immediately jump on the bike for a good 15 mile ride. This training session is in prep for the Wildman Biathlon (http://www.ncia.net/wildman/) coming up on August 11th. Normally, brick sessions are done in bike/run order. But the Wildman is a run/bike/hill-run so I wanted to see what it was like coming off a run onto the bike.

My 10 mile run starts off with some minor rollers, but then around mile 3 the hills get a little more serious. I hate runs that are flat. I think it's like kissing someone that doesn't know how to kiss. You go through the motions, but you can't wait for it to be over and then you leave feeling less than satisified. So I always try to find a course that knows how to kiss. I know plenty of them so that's not really an issue. :) The course I chose was basically an out and back with a little dogleg that added a few extra hills. My pace was around 7:10 or so which was reasonable. The plan was to run a strong pace without going too crazy. In retrospect, I might try to drop the pace to sub-7's next time to make it a bit more challenging and emulate racing conditions are little more closely.

I finish the run feeling pretty good. My legs are a little wobbly coming in and that's perfect. I keep my shorts on, but change into my biking jersey, shoes, helmet, glasses, gloves (God, running is so much easier. You're basically n*ked except for shorts and running shoes). I grab my prefilled water bottle, some hammer gel and I'm off on my ride. I take it fairly easy intially, running through system checks to see how things are going. I down a bottle of propel that I threw in the back of my biking jersey and I eat some gatorade jelly beans that I had in my desk drawer for about a year. I looked for an expiration date but didn't see one so I was good to go.

The ride goes pretty good, except for 2 things. One is that I'm really tired and beat up from the run. I now understand why triathlons are done in the order they are. Least stress to the body (swimming) to the most stressful (running). The second thing that seems to be wrong is that my bike computer is lying to me. I don't understand how I can be going down hill with the chain in the big ring in the front and the small ring in the back, my cadence is good, but my speed is only 17 MPH??? Whisky Tango Foxtrot?!?!? NFW! I'm working too hard and feeling owies and this lying b*stard has the nerve to tell me that I'm only going 17 MPH?!? It then jumps up to around 34, which seems reasonable. I know that I might have the pickup in the wrong location, or perhaps the magnet has come loose and needs to be repositioned, but I hate that bike computer anyway and I've been eyeing this nicer one at the bike store so this is the perfect excuse to deep-6 the thing.

I arrive back home and I'm not feeling 100%. That was a tough workout. I take some ibuprophen before going to bed that night. I rarely have to take pain killers after a workout, but this was a tough one. I also banged my knee when I almost fell off my bike, and I strained my calf muscle as I made a valiant attempt to save whatever dignity I had remaining. My last thought before passing out for the night was that I really, really s*ck on the bike and I'm going to get my butt handed to me come August 11th. :) I need to do more of those I think, but with the lying b*stard retired in a deep hole somewhere and my sparkling new bike computer feeding me praise and telling me how awesome my riding is. I expect to pay extra for those features. :)