Tour Training: Week One Summary

I figure that at this point, condensing my journal entries every few days makes more sense than complaining about the same stuff over and over again on a daily basis, yknow?

The past few days have gone really well. I've had to stop along the way to hydrate and rest, which means the current training plan is to keep doing this particular distance until my heart and lungs are at least not angry with me.

Really, my cardiovascular situation is what's holding me back. Yes, my arms are still killing me two miles in and their soreness compounds the CV situation, but it's a manageable thing. Yup, it's all about my heart rate, because at the end of every ride my legs are asking me why we're not still going, which is perhaps the most encouraging thing coming out of this first week. As soon as I get my wind up, my legs will carry me forward.

That said, I'm starting to have my doubts about being ready for the Tour in time. I don't know, I was expecting my wind to be, well, better than it is right now, I completely underestimated how out of shape I really was. Again, upside is that I'm better than I was and not as good as I'll be. I'm still going to try and get ready for the Tour, but...if I don't I need to get myself psyched to be doing this just to do it. Which, I'm getting better at all the time. Being out on my bike is fun for fun's sake and I'm slowly altering my lifestyle to include this type of exercise.

Thursday was a good ride. The switch to shorts paid huge dividends, though it was perhaps the hottest and least cloudy ride of the week. By mile three I was burning up, and I had to take my helmet off to help ventilate my head. Then, I had to walk the bike the last half mile cuz the final uphill was just too much to deal with.

On the way down, I had my inevitable mechanical issue. I've figured out that the problem occurs when I shift too much. Willy's suggestion to look at my H and L Limit Screws made a lot more sense as I flipped Black Five over on the trail and rehooked his chain. Yeah, mental note, check the H and L Limit Screws tomorrow.

Before heading out Friday, I thought I'd look at these Limit Screws I'd read so much about. When I started out playing with the screws the way Willy's online manual had suggested I was skeptical, then I was enraged. In twenty minutes I'd managed to screw Black Five up even more than he'd already been screwed up. After twenty minutes, I'd lost all my gears except for wicked high and the mere suggestion of shifting into something else caused my buddy to freak out and derail. I was not happy.

After a quick, cleansing conversation with Gunder I re-read the manual and went back out there. Within five minutes or so I'd come to terms with the fact that my Limit Screws didn't look or sound much like the ones in the manual so I was just going to have to reverse engineer the instructions. Once I did that, Black Five was shifting like a champ and I was out on the road.

I start out by going out my driveway, down my street and onto the sideroad that leads to the main drag in this part of El Capital. I'm on the sideroad for maybe two blocks and it's the only time that I'm actually on the "road." As I approached the stop sign at the main drag, I saw a woman who was older than my wife, younger than my mother on a nice little mid-range mountain bike pedaling along on the bike trail.

She wasn't in full regalia, though she was sporting racing shorts and shoes, and she was going at about my pace. Perfect, a pace biker.

I followed her at about four bike lengths of distance up the hill. It was nice to have someone in front of me giving me a cadence. In case you haven't noticed, I'm not much more than a kid who used to ride to the park/college commuter biker. This whole biking for distance and exercise thing is totally and completely new to me. After about a mile, mile and a half my pace biker had to stop for water and oxygen so I just kept on going. By the time I got to two and a half miles I was dying and needed my own water break. She nearly caught up to me before I remounted Black Five and headed farther up the hill. That was the last I saw of her until about half a mile after the turnaround. She was still coming up the hill and remarked that I'd beaten her up the hill. I smiled and said something insipid and got ready for my rocket home.

I carefully shifted into a mid-gear that would allow me to actually do some pedaling on the downhill, but in the interest of not derailing the chain completely I didn't actually shift all the way down the way I needed to. Oh well, one thing at a time, right?

All in all, a great ride. My return time was sub-30mins and my uphill time was sub-45 minutes so I'm definitely getting better. Today (Saturday) is my day of rest so I'll let everything heal up a bit before going back out there tomorrow. I'm going to start timing myself, if only because I have an ever increasing desire to know how long things are taking me (really.) So, yeah, that's what's up.