I usually do yoga on Mondays as recovery, but after Steilacomm, I was seriously reminded of how crap my skills are. I took to the streets for a long ride focusing on getting my cross on. I rode to Sellwood park and practiced in the lower grassy area for a while, until I couldn’t handle all the passers-by staring at me and letting their yappy dogs run circles around me while I stupidly tried to jump onto my bike. So I rode to the upper section of the park, where I discovered a small crew of Ironclad racers practicing a small course, complete with barriers. They invited me to join in, so I focused on the barriers and continued to just focus on my dismount/remount.
Tuesday I was still stiff and a little sore from all my weekend crashing, so I did a long session of yoga, it felt amazing. Yoga is my savior.
Wednesday PV met up at Gabriel Park for another cross skills practice; barriers barriers and more barriers. Still…can’t…remount. UGUGHGUGHGUH! Someone on my team said he made it his personal goal to get me to remount properly. He has given me tons of advice (as have many), but still no luck. I think there are a couple of factors at play here: my bike is getting ahead of me when I try to remount, causing the stutter-step, I’m not swinging my leg up fast enough(?) and I’m not pushing off enough with my other foot to keep up the momentum of my bike. And I’m a huge weenie and am afraid to jump on my bike. That’s the real problem here. I don’t really know how to solve that one though.
Thankfully PV is getting a super exclusive training session next week…maybe then I’ll be able to take the leap of faith. I’ll report back on that one.
Also, today I had a kick ass interval workout. During the working intervals, my heart rate was between 170-180 bmps, and during my 15 second sprints, it was between 180-183. Oh hell yeah. The work intervals are in bold, rest (140-155 bpm’s) non-bold.
[1, 1], [2, 2], [3, 3], [4, 4], [4, 4], [4, 4], [4, 10] (all of the 4 minute intervals ended with a harder 30 second interval with a full-on 15 second sprint to finish each one)
This was my attempt to simulate a race; a hard LT interval ending with a hard sprint. Felt really great, I was totally surprised. I haven’t felt that great this week, so I wasn’t expecting much. Yay for happy surprises.
