Saturday morning I decided I wanted to have my legs ripped off. I wanted to hurt so much all I could think about was each pedal stroke and how only through extreme concentration could I keep from vomiting all over my handlebars.
And so I went for my first race paced team ride. It was a beautiful day, the sun was out, it was relatively warm, and everyone was in good spirits. The team does about five big intervals throughout the ride; I ended up in the second group for the most part; I kept looking down at my heart rate monitor, seeing 180, and thinking “really? still? How…is…this…possible…” I haven’t ridden in a real pace line like that in a scarily long time; I have missed that feeling when you just keep thinking you couldn’t possibly throw down any more power, you’re about to get popped, and then somehow you find it. Again and again for 50 miles. That is an amazing feeling.
Yes, at times it felt like my knee cap was going to explode, but not in a sustained way. I iced it after the ride and it seemed fine. I had decided I would limit myself to one team ride a weekend. Especially since a bunch of us went salsa dancing that night where I went on a mini bender and shot some highly charged emails when I got home (let me count the ways I can make a complete ass of myself in a 4 day span…MANY).
For some reason I woke up, hung over, at 7am and couldn’t get back to sleep. The weather was supposed to be complete shit, I felt like shit, why the fuck would I want to go on the ride? Well, I did anyway, mostly because it seemed like the most ridiculous thing I could do, because the challenge was thrown to show up in the morning, and because the thought of the gym made me cringe.
So, another 3 hour tempo paced ride, a fair amount of climbing, and I held on. I actually felt great until the last 30 minutes or so when the sky opened up and my hands were so cold they were somehow both completely numb and in firey pain. And I started to bonk a bit, my stomach finally said “WHAT THE FUCK WOMAN? A 3 hour ride in pouring rain after 6 hours of sleep and a night out? Are you INSANE?” I was mighty happy to get home when I did.
But fuckin aye. I feel pretty damn good right now, although exhausted. The Santa Barbara trip doesn’t seem quite so scary now.
