On the Road

Here's shot of something a little different:

It's me out riding my road bike without a number on my back. I think that it has probably been a couple of months since i took my road bike and just went riding around. With the rains of the last two of days it will be another day until I can get back on the dirt, and maybe by this afternoon the gravel will be ridable again. So, this morning pavement was all I had. Not riding was out of the question, as I was already slipping into another lazy streak. A couple of off days of because of family stuff + a rain day = I have to ride today.

OK, I just didn't ride around. I did a warmup, and some tempo work on the Gilbert loop, worked on my tuck going into the wind, tried to attack on all the hills, and managed to close a 1/2 mile gap on another bike in a 3 mile span (the old guy on the trike never knew what hit him).

I also remembered my chat with Chris Hansen this weekend (he was trying to talk me into going to the state road race over by the Mississippi), and he was talking about the importance of sprint work when doing crits. Coming out of every corner in a crit turns into a mini-sprint just to hang on - especially if your cornering needs as much work as mine does.

So, when I was out this morning, I tried doing some sprint excersizes. After I had done my other work, and was already tired (like in a race), I put it at about 17 mph, and about 60 cadence. From there I did an out of the saddle sprint until I was out of gas. Rinse and repeat. After few miles of those, I was cooked.

I'll be doing that again.