Catching Up & Tailwinds

Wow, been a couple of weeks since my last post.

Roy - your Canadian buddies are doing pretty good! Johnny & I went for a great tailwinds ride yesterday - more on that later.

This last week was tough weight-wise. At weigh in time I was up 1 pound. I suspect that it was a water-issue, as it was about an hour after our tailwinds ride ended, and I'd been rehydrating and replenishing. It was also 7pm instead of 7am for weigh-in. So, I'm not going to get too uptight from it. It does have me on alert, though.

On to the fun stuff - yesterday was Johnny's birthday, so the two of us headed out for a tailwinds century. The wind started out pretty tame, but built up to about a 45km/hr blow - unfortunately, it was from the northwest, so there was never a full-on tailwind. Our route was basically East, then south, so we tried to keep the wind at our back as much as possible. John's wife, Sheri, was our chaffeur for the trip.

We chatted, we hammered, we spun and basically had a fantastic time. Our finishing time was 3:52:50 with an average speed of 41.9km/hr. Not my fastest century, but the fastest and farthest I've gone in awhile! Really felt good to push the legs for a little longer time. The legs have recovered nicely, no stiffness or anything like that. I did notice a bit of neck pain and lower back discomfort at the end of the ride. Just goes to show again that I'm in bad need of strengthening the core more.

My bike performed well - not seat post issues and everything seems to be tuned pretty good. I'm interested in getting a power-fit at some point to see if there's some tweaking that can be done to improve my power output. I'm also really needing a new set of wheels. While my Rovals are really aero and fast, they're also very spongy. I need something stiffer. I'd also really like to try out some tubeless, but there's not alot of used ones out there and new ones are over $1,000 USD. (The ones I'd want are $1400 USD)

I was really impressed this last week with Bicycling magazine. I'd all but given up on it, as it seemed like such a "nothing in there" rag. They've really upped their game and I might even consider a subscription now. Great articles. The most recent one I liked dealt with diet - and had an interesting blip in there from Joe Friel. He got me thinking and I've since started to do some more research on the whole idea of blood acidity levels. You can find the basics of his thoughts at Big surprise - it largely boils down to more fruits and veggies, and less grains and stuff.

With that, I've also been looking at his training plans. I'm going to take a look and see what kind of coaching he's doing, and costs, etc. as well. I know I'll have to add a power meter of some kind to my training if I use him, as he requires that of all his athletes. Ideally, it looks like a Garmin 705 with a Powertap is the way to go. Don't know if I'll be able to afford that for awhile.

Anyway, I will continue with the weight loss struggle. I'm hoping to make a big break-through this week as I increase the intensity of my rides, and increase the distance of some of my runs.

More snow

Still doing all of my riding indoors on the computrainer - haven't been outside on the bike since March 22. YUCK! Snowed again last night. I'm really looking forward to being able to get outside again. In the meantime, I'm working hard.

I've found that running is really doing alot to help take the weight off, and I may change up my work-out schedule a little more next week to add more running (I've been trying to run 3x/week.) Longest run to date was this last Tuesday - I did 15km in 1:24. Even at that pace I won't be able to break 2 hours for a half marathon. However, the good news is I wasn't pushing it particularly hard, as my HR hovered right around the 152 mark. I'm sure as the weight continues to come off that my aver HR will continue to drop for that time. I do need to start doing more running intervals to get my comfortable pace up a little higher. 2 months until the 1/2 marathon, so still lots of time.

My watts/kg has definitely started improving on the bike. On 25 Feb it was at 2.6 - I'm currently at 2.98 That's a combination of raising my average wattage output from 231 to 245, and lowering my weight to 81.6kg. I'm still on track to hit my weight goal of 150lbs by Magrath triathlon, but I'm concerned about how the weight loss is going to come from the 160lb and on mark.

While I've been consistently losing 2 pnds / week, sometimes a little more - it hasn't been as easy as I expected it to be. I'm really having to focus and concentrate on it. That last 10 pnds is gonna be HARD!! But, for now I'll continue to mark off 2 pounds /week and try and get a pound ahead here and there. (I'm a little ahead of schedule right now.)