On the Road Again

Did my first 50+ mile ride today in at least 4 years. It was a beautiful morning, about 50 degrees when we started. Rode from the Valley out Wild Horse Creek, up Ossenfort then through St. Albans and back onto the newly paved (Old or New?) Tavern Rd. Then hit Fox Creek up to Six Flags and Allenton Rd into Greensfelder Park. Found our way back to Wild Horse via Rockwoods and took the flats back into the Valley. Lots of church and pumpkin traffic through the flats. Not my favorite place to be on a bike on Sunday, but we made it. The ride took a little more than 3 and 1/2 hours; max HR of 182 and avg. of 144. Sorry, no power meter data to geek out on.

It is humbling to drag yourself back into shape, with any sport or activity. Slowly but surely it gets easier; but it is never easy. It is definitely more fun to have a steady wheel to follow and friends to give encouragement when the road rises steeply ahead of you. PJ and Joe didn't make it a hammerfest; for that, I'm quite grateful.

Comments

Trihardist said…
50 miles is nothing to sneeze at. No halfway on getting back into biking shape for the Iron Maven!
11:54 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit...
Read more

Strength: Overcoming Tradition & Assumptions

Image
The term "strength" comes with many images and stereotypes. The most common stereotype usually includes intimidating men who look like action figures, in spaces that look like iron jungles. Strength is associated with mass gain, limb girth increases, muscle hypertrophy and maximal force production against an external load. With regard to lower body strength, we speak in terms of multiples of bodyweight (BW), with the ratio of 2x BW historically viewed as necessary and desirable. We have historically trained in terms of 1 RM. There has been a trend recently to adopt a VBT (velocity based training) approach, as we know 1 RM changes on a daily basis and technology now allows us to more finely tune things with velocity as the target within each set. These things can be helpful as we initially learn to measure and document progress. But I think it is important to step back from this narrow outlook, because this view of strength does not serve all of us well, in either the rehab or...
Read more