Winter-training in effect!!!

Winter has settled in here in Louisville and the daylight savings time change a couple of weeks ago has forced me to do my weekday rides on the rollers and Fluid trainer indoor. Even some weekend rides are indoor due to cold, wet, windy conditions. Yuck! Indoor training is brutal at times and mindnumbing at the very least. Everything hurts and is more miserable riding on the trainer for all of the obvious reasons. Your mind doesn't have the change of scenery and motion to drown out the fact that your butt is hurting. Plus the fact that you can't coast like you would on the road means the effort is more concentrated. Over the years I have found that I gain some mental toughness for racing while suffering on the trainer.

On the upside, warming up and cooling down on the rollers means my bike handling skills get tuned up. Rollers smooth out your pedal stroke, due the the fact that jerky pedalling motion may mean losing your balance on the PVC rollers. I don't do tricks per se, but riding with no hands, using the TV remote and answering the phone are part of my repetoire now.

I get pretty giddy when the teammates and I get together for a road ride on the weekend. A couple of weeks ago I rode to meet them ended up with 88mi for the day in about 5hrs. That was bad enough, since I hadn't ridden that many miles in months, but to top it off we did 10 hill repeats on Westport Hill. Super steep and about a 1/2 mile. To make that more painful, it was a huge headwind coming back into town for like 25mi and after getting to where my teammates met me and peeled off, I still had 15mi on my own. My legs were cooked but it was great.

I need to mix it up with some MTB rides and night rides over in the Seneca to Cherokee Park loop. Bike lanes and lights are the only thing that make that possible on weelnights though.

Well, time to go, I've got and hour and a half session with Muscle-Tension intervals to do.

Oh goody!!!