Oh the wonderful (?) pain

(Picture to the left is a poor image of the view up Route 122 towards Sheffield Heights, the ~900' ridge that I went over today.)

Oddly enough, my boss was talking the other day about the first thing to learn about cycling is that it is all about enduring pain. His wife had made a comment that cycling is the only sport where the pain starts when you first begin riding and never really ends. I don't know as I agree with the 'all about' part, but dealing with pain and suffering is probably a big part of improving as a cyclist. When you push against your limits in order to move beyond them, you body suffers and your mind really needs to take over to keep you going.

This was brought home today during my long ride of the week. I'm currently training for a roughly 200km (134mile) ride towards the end of August. Since I'm figuring on this taking about 8 hours of rolling time, I'm working on increasing my long rides to somewhere near that duration over the next few training blocks. Since my long ride prior to my recovery week was about 4 hours, I planned on a ride that I figured would take me 4.5 hours, about a 12% increase. That is a bit more than the 10% they reccomend, but not by much. I'm 'stealing' the time from my higher intensity workouts as endurance is more important to my event. So my overall training time probably isn't increasing all that much.

So the route I planned worked out to 81.5 miles on my mapping software (the PowerTap measured it at 81.81, so pretty close) and took me 4 hours and 40 minutes. My goal for this ride was to maintain an average power (well, normalized) in my CP180 range. This would be quite a challenge as that is my best power for a 3 hour period and I was going to try and maintain that for over 4.5 hours. I did pretty well actually (see my power distribution chart above), coming in just under my goal range (or in it if you go by normalized power). My speed was a bit lower than I had planned on, 17.5 mph compared to 18mph, but given the amount of climbing involved in this route (4150'), which is about 1400' more than my previous longest ride from the 27th. (see route profile to the left)

Somewhere around 3 to 3.5 hours into the ride my legs were definitely hurting. It became more and more difficult to maintain the power level I wanted to keep with for the ride. It didn't help any when I had to sprint to avoid a swooping peregrine falcon after climbing a 1 mile, 3.5% climb. Going to 127% threshold power for 35 seconds after 4 hours in the saddle was an additional level of pain. Well, it was painful after it ended. While doing it, it didn't really hurt that much, but when I eased up I quickly became aware of the pain.

When I made it home, my legs were definitely tight and sore, and I was definitely ready to get cleaned up, eat and get off my legs and relax. Now I get to think ahead to next week's ride when I'm shooting for 5 hours and around 90 miles. More wonderful pain.