Windy Day

Once again it was windy today. Maybe a bit more than it was on Tuesday. To make matters worse (better?), the wind was generally west-ish, which is the direction I head out each day which is also generally uphill. Oh well, that will just make me stronger.

The wind did slow me down a bit compared to Tuesday's ride, but I still went 3 minutes longer on the outbound leg, which is my plan, and ended up going about 7% further distance wise, so not too bad.

I'm finding that for awhile I think my biggest limiter is going to be upper body fitness. In some ways I feel my rides more in my hands, arms and shoulders than I do in my legs. So I may need to start doing some upper body strength work to help out there.

Don't get me wrong, the legs get aching, especially on Dole Hill (1 mile long, 5.4% average gradient, 8.6% max) or the sharp steep climb just into Danville (.76 miles long, average gradient of 3.6% with a max of 8.3%). Coming back there is a steeper climb, but by then I'm heading east so I have a bit of the wind helping (.6miles, 4.6% average gradient, 12% max).

That is the sort of terrain we have around here. A climbs which make it tough for an out of shape (relatively speaking) cyclist to take it easy and build endurance miles, but too short to really do climbing workouts effectively on. So outbound today I averaged 1.3% grade with a 10% max while after turning around and heading back I had a -1.3% grade (naturally) but still had a 12% max gradient climb. So no escaping it.

On the bright side, I once read that if you live in a hilly area you don't really need to worry about interval training as the terrain will take care of that for you. That is sort of my plan for now until I take some weight off and get some endurance back. Just ride a bit further every day (about 10% longer on the outbound leg) and let the terrain dictate the effort. In today's ride for example I had 10 "intervals" where I was 90% or higher than my threshold power for a minute or more. The average was 1:50 in the interval with an average of 2:00 rest between them (rest being that my power dropped below 90% of threshold, which isn't really resting in all cases).

Regards.