Recovery

Been awhile since I posted, but I've been keeping up with my riding and have gotten a handle on my nutrition as well.

As of this morning I've lost 9.6lbs in 3 weeks, which is pretty good. It actually hasn't been all that difficult once the decision was made to do it. Its funny how cycling provided the impetus to make the change. Well, maybe not that strange, seeing how every pound I have to push/pull up over Banzai Bridge (the steep part of the ride home, thankfully not very long but hits about 11%) adds that little extra hurt to the effort.

Last week was recovery week (I'm doing a 2 week on 1 week recovery system) and this posed a problem. Since riding isn't just training at this point, but also transportation, it made it very difficult to actually cut back very much. The most stressful part of the ride, both going to and coming from work, couldn't be avoided. What I ended up doing was walking a couple days and one day I got to borrow a car for the commute. Walking, while still exercise, is much less stressful than cycling so provided some recovery while still getting me to work.

A related issue is how I can increase the training effort as I'm pretty restricted to where I have to end up each day. What I've started to do is ride west for a bit before heading east to get to work. This will let me add time in controlled increments each week that I'm building. My initial goal, which I likely won't get to for a couple of months, is to take the North Danville Loop as my outbound leg of the commute. This would give me a ride of about 19 miles total between both legs. That would be around 1.25 to 1.5 hours total, which is about what I'm shooting for, with maybe the occaisional longer ride.

Lastly, I found that half a mile makes a huge difference in how I feel at the end of my ride. For the first few weeks, I'd go straight home on the return leg. The problem with that is it put me climbing the last .3 miles and coming to a stop. I felt like toast doing that. I decided this week to continue up the road to the top of the hill then come back, giving me a bit of light spinning before a last little climb up the driveway. It is amazing how fresh I feel after that, well at least compared to when I don't tack on that extra distance.

Until next time, keep riding.