Sweedish Berries

So yesterdays secret training called for 5 hours steady aerobic ride and four hours on Sunday. Given that the weather was a little, well a lot nicer Saturday, I figured I'd get as much as I could in on Saturday and deal with it on Sunday.

So I did a quick 40 km before joining the Cornwall group ride, where I met up with Tasha and my new Protege Matt Despaties whom I brought over to the RWR side of the force. So group ride gets going, a little slow but it picked up nicely and made for a great way to get a couple hours in, and no group ride is complete without a couple sign sprints. No matter who you are it's always good to mix it up a little in the real world. I mean you can sprint your brains out in training, but doing against a group I think is great for the timing and a little bit closer to racing, well sort of.

So Tash and I brought Matt on our Kenyon Road where we lit it up a bit on the rolling hills, gravel and only got chased by one dog. I was really impressed with the kid, Matt, I'm glad that he's going to hook up with Nick Vipond for some coaching and join the RWR juniors, did I mention I was impressed with the 17 year old who is already 6 foot 2, before you know it he's going to be as tall as me. Nick already warned me not to totally rip his legs off after all we want him to progress nicely, but no worries, I made sure he didn't exceed his time and told him ease up here and there and sheltered him from the wind on what could have probably been a very long last 20 km home for him.

So it was still 15 degs outside so I rode on the nicely shoulder highway 2 to Lancaster and back after that. So, I had made a pit stop at 4 hours in to replenish with some chocolate milk which gave me the biggest brain freeze...and some water and a coke which I continued to sip on...
So everything was ok until I was about 10 km from home, so about 190 km into my ride when all of a sudden the pedals just weren't turning over as well and the over pass felt really high! Oh no, I know what is gong to happen, my bars felt like they were melting into ground and I knew there was a store about a km ahead. I was a really long km. So I walk into the store and see salvation in form of Sweedish Berries,mmmmm, I rip the pack open at the counter and dumped the contents into my mouth for a big mouthful of sweedish berrie goo. About 30 seconds later everything was alright and I made it home where my sister had cooked up a huge spaghetti meal for us.

We headed out for our ride this morning clearly under estimating the March rain, and we were soaked and frozen after about 20 minutes, so as much as I love being tough, I just couldn't take it after a huge couple weeks of training and don't think my body could deal with an extra stress today, so we resigned ourselves to ride the trainers to finish off the last few hours. Well Tasha finished the hours, I cut it short as I also have a session to do tomorrow.

I was trying to be Belgian tough, lovin the rain and misery, but it's definitely a balance between tough and stupid cause being tiered, cold and eating road grime from 4 inch puddles is probably the easiest way to make yourself sick this time of year and like I said, we were way under dressed, not to mention my quasi bonk yesterday.

Moral of the story? It's great to push yourself and punish your self, but you have to keep in mind that you break your body down so it can build itself up better and stronger, if you push it too hard and too long you just don't get to benefit from the damage you inflicted on yourself.
As much as you and your coach put together a program to prepare you to reach your goals, you have to listen to yourself, or at least the person beside you throwing helmets or watter bottles, hehe.

DSJ