I'm in with the in crowd.

The indoor crowd, that is. Patience did not pay off today. The early morning turned out to be the only time of the day when outdoor riding would have been the least bit worthwhile. After that the rain just fell and fell. I enjoyed a nice nap, and then took the time to do a long stretch and core workout before climbing on the trainer for a 90 minute session, including two lactic tolerance intervals. These are my least favorite type of work, and it shows, because grinding away at low rpm is a marked weakness for me. This hurts me on long, steady climbs. Five minutes is about my limit (which thankfully was the duration of the climb at Hollenbeck) so I pushed it for 8 minutes on the first one and 10 minutes on the second one. Baby steps, you know? These were done at 80 rpm too, even though 75 might have been better. On 53x12.com, Michele Ferrari comments that the reason higher rpms allow you to stay fresher longer is because the length of time the muscle is contracted is reduced, and therefore blood flow is less restricted. I believe it is true, because low rpms hurt like hell to me. Still though, on the climbs a lower cadence just seems more efficient, and it helps hold the HR down. Bolder and his prairie-dog posse will be glad to know that I listened to a U2 cd during this workout, and as a result this post almost got named "Slow down my beating heart."

Last night (Friday) I did manage to get outdoors for a workout. Thursday night, I got a great massage, and then returned home and got ready to relax. No sooner had I turned on "The Office" that I realized I had to work. Crap. Not real work, just remote connect to a hospital that was adding a new server and reconfigure one of the applications that I support. Easy money (usually) and that mid-month check helps. Of course, these things never go the way they are planned. They were supposed to be ready at 10:30 pm and expected to be back up by 1:30. My piece would only take about 20 minutes. As luck would have it, I got a message that they had some hardware issues and things would be delayed by about two hours. I dozed off. On cue, the phone rang at 12:30, we are ready to go. After some more issues, it didn't wrap up until 2:30, and I couldn't get back to sleep until it was almost time to get up. Despite all this, somehow I managed to get on the trainer for 30 minutes with a few short intervals. Friday evening I did manage to make an early escape when a big group meeting in the Canton building, which is closest to home, ended too late to make it worth going back to my building. As tired as I was, dinner and sleep sounded like a good idea. When I got home though, it wasn't raining, and I ended up quickly taking down the Specialized, fitting some aero bars that my man Dee had graciously given me, swapping the pedals to ATACS, and moving the seat forward and up.

My madness centered around the upcoming duathlon. The only disc wheel I have is an old 126 mm spacing freewheel HED. I have a homegrown mongrel TT bike, but it has really low bars and is not easy to ride, so for working my way through a bunch of squirrelly duathletes, I am not sure it would be a good choice. The ATACS idea was because my MTB shoes are super easy to take on and off, and of course will be better for running in and out of the transition if this is required. I got outside on the bike by 6:30. The bike immediately felt comfortable, and I tested it with a few laps of a nearby loop where we used to have a 4 mile TT. During the ride I decided that maybe I should ride home and then try going right out for a run. So that is what I did. After an hour on the bike, I rode hard right to the door, ran in, swapped shoes and ditched the helmet, and got back outside in under 3 minutes. It was raining now, but I ran about 5.5k in just under 24 minutes, with an average HR of only 142. Not bad, and I felt fine. Maybe it was the massage.

I may get chastised for writing another "boring, diary style" blog entry. KL is on her way back from the Bristol RR in western NY, where once again Team Terry took 1st, 2nd, and 4th. Today was also the Sterling Road Race, held in, of all places, Sterling MA. I have never done this race, so I saw no reason to start now. Quite a few of the mates were signed up though, including Dave L. Our team has quite a cast of characters, as did my old team. Back there, we had great nicknames too, like The Belgian Strongman, Big Mig, The Course Cutter, and of course, The Cronoman, who in my absence started the mass exodus to BOB. At BOB, we don't have quite as many cool nicknames, but we still have quite a cast. We have dubbed Dave L. "Zoo" as most of the morons in the club want to pronounce his name Lewinsky (go figure) instead of the correct Low-Zoo-ski. I can't wait until we get to a race when he is in a group either off the front (ok, we can dream) or off the back, so we can dub it the "Zoo Man Group." I don't have cable, but I really miss watching the Giro and Vuelta because they have the cool labels in Italian and Spanish, like Grouppo Maglia Rosa, or Escapados.

This last bit is the kind of high-brow humor regular readers have come to expect. I stole this from our club email list because it was just too good to not share with the general public. Someone started a thread talking about the speed of the sprint at the Giro. One flat stage was said to be around 71 kph (almost 44 mph) at the finish. Some of our clowns piped in with anecdotes about how they had hit 50 mph in this sprint or that sprint, as if they were just a plane ride away from coming off McEwen's wheel for a stage win in Torino. Our hairiest member (huh-huh), a jackass with 23 bikes, who I at first couldn't stand, but have grown to enjoy and respect, came back with this gem:

Date: Fri May 12, 2006 5:03 pm
Subject: Re: [bobcycling] Giro speed bicycleracer...

i had too much chinese food last night and the dump i
took at midnight was clocked at well over 80kph as it
blew out the back of the bowl.

and that was me just sitting on.

... Thanks for reading!