8.10.2020 - Monday Workouts and Talk

5.5mi run today; saving my legs for a long-ish training ride/run tomorrow w/someone who's quite a bit stronger. Riding with this guy always means suffering..

Nothing so dramatic today. Just 1:10 of simulated "hills", mostly big-gear work. My body (about 5'7" and 120-ish pounds) requires a lot of strength work to be even semi-competitive on the bike. We have plenty of real hills around here, but no one to ride them with--no group rides going on with local clubs. I guess the 10-person gathering limit (aside from, apparently, protests) is too restrictive for them. Aside from that, I don't know anyone of the right speed to ride with otherwise, don't feel safe riding solo. Ugh.

The group I rode with in 2018 in Boise was crazy strong. There were weaker cyclists in the club, but they all chose the shorter rides. I was training for IM Malaysia, so I needed to join the "long ride" group (usually 60-90 miles) but it was a constant struggle not to get dropped. No triathletes in the group, almost all guys (plus one very competitive woman) who basically rode their version of the TDF every Saturday. No one else was leaving anything in the tank for a post-ride brick run or a week of IM training!

Not just a matter of pride but not wanting to get lost in the middle of nowhere (and "nowhere" in Idaho encompasses a whole lotta country, some of it without GPS or even cell signals, much less places to get more water), and that awful wind. I swear, I spent the entire year riding and running into the wind. Get dropped and you will be fighting the wind so hard (esp. at my size without big guys to draft) there is no hope of catching up again until/unless someone drops back to rescue you (or, in my case, they head up a really big hill)! I'm sure they were all relieved when I stopped coming due to injury and then moving back to Oregon.