Thursday, March 09, 2006

Bad ride = crappy workout

Still rainy and/or wet, so I had the computrainer all hooked up and ready for this a.m. I had to drag myself out of bed. It took my about 20min of banter to get up today. So then I got on the compu and loaded a pre-made ride caled "long." It's 18miles, and I wanted to do about an hour, so I figured this would be perfect. Wrong. Within the first minutes it starts a climb that lasts about 5 min an dis 12-14% grade! No time to warm up or anything. I say, oh well, and mash through it @ about 38-40 rpm, 4-5 mph. Because I've been pedaling for about 3 minutes, I can't get my heart rate up at all. On a huge compu climb, I'm hovering around 118-125 bpm. So then the ride goes down hill @ the same rate it went up, about 12-14%, which means in the 53x12, spinning out, no effort around 32mph. Then it just hits another 12% wall for about 5-6minutes and flattens out for a while. At this point I'm getting mad because the course sucks so bad. It keeps going from pedalling as fast as you can w/ a low HR to such a high hill that you can't get your HR up because you can't pedal faster than about 39rpm. It's been about 1/2 hour though and I don't want to stop and load a new course. So I decide I'll just stop at 1 hr, regardless of where I am on the course. Then the next climb comes. Gradient goes to 8%, 9%, 10% and I tell myself "as soon as that hits 12%, I'm stopping." 11%, 11.5%, 12% and I'm done. I put on a worthless 41 minutes. Given how tired I was, I should have just stayed in bed. When you can't get you HR elevated, it means you're tired, not sleepy, but in need of recovery. I did a situp routine and spent a little time stretching. Should have stayed in bed.

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