Sunday, 2/27 LSD

Group rides are always hard, on one hand its definitely more fun to be riding with others, but you end up stopping more then you would like, riding some else’s tempo, and or doing route slightly less then ideal . Today's plan was simple for (Master Chief) Ben and I to do some LSD (Long Slow Distance). The route was to head down south from Seattle, through Renton, go down the Maple Valley highway, through Maple Valley, over to Enumclaw, up Mud Mountain, and back. The route has a great mixture of both long flat tempo sections interspersed between some knarley climbs. Tempo wise the idea was to basically chill the whole day. The whole ride went very well. The only real difficulty was that my rear shifting more or less completely fell apart over the course of the ride. By the end of the ride the largest rear cog I could get into was at most a 17 tooth gear.

We ended up averaging 17.9 MPH for 120 miles and were only off the bike for ~13 minutes. Not quite Team Velowear caliber times, but also not too bad considering its February. This week, was definitely the big week training hour wise, I ended up somewhere in the 18-19 hour range. This next week will definitely be a recovery week. I’m really excited that, there are only ~3 months to go.

Food during the ride: Two bottles of Perpetuem (one scoop in each), two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, one flask vanilla gel, and a large Fuji apple.

Recovery (same as yesterday): I took two Super AO, did two scoops of whey with milk and took 4 Hammer TR, and then propped the legs up for a little bit.