Rest Week & The Wall

Rest weeks are always a sight for sore eyes - and muscles for that matter. Typically rest weeks come about every three weeks or 16 days of hard workouts and then 5 days of rest. Now rest weeks aren't 5 days of sitting at home on the couch eating Bon Bons but are just decreased volume weeks. Where last week was a 14.5 hour week this week was only 8 hours. Through all the training for the Half Ironman and during the first 10 weeks of Ironman training I've never really felt like I needed a rest week for any other reason than muscle recovery, until now. Last week was the first time that I've really felt just fatigued and as if I couldn't get enough sleep. Hooray for rest weeks!

On the Saturday after a rest week comes some of the hardest days though. Usually this is when you have a hard brick day - or a day where you have a long ride immediately followed by a long run. These days are important because they are basically race day rehearsals, you get a chance to try and hone in your nutrition plan on the long ride and make sure that it will work and not upset your stomach on the long run that follows. You also try and wear what you're going to wear on race day to make sure that it's not going to chafe. Last Saturday was one of those days.

In a masochistic kind of way I really like these workouts. It's a good way to gauge your increased fitness from the last time you had a hard brick day a few weeks before. It's definitely hard to get motivated to get out the door and start one of these workouts but once you finish a hard 5+ hour brick day there is a great feeling of accomplishment for the rest of the day if not weeks to come.

Last Saturday consisted of a 70 mile ride and a 7 mile run down in Cedar Hill with the coach. I learned that Cedar Hill is called Cedar Hill for a reason, there are hills there to be had. Most hills are just "hills" but only the epic ones get names like "The Wall". We first approached The Wall from the direction that would put us descending it. I usually do pretty good with steep descents and getting up to fast speeds on the bike without being shaken by the speeds, maybe it has something to do with driving a motorcycle. As we approached The Wall it was just like going over the first drop of a roller coaster, as you approached the crest of the hill you couldn't see the road in front of you or just how steep the hill was until just before you started descending. At this point it's too late to turn back and I might have let an "Oh sh*t" slip out. The decent was super fast and luckily on a fairly decent road without many bumps. After the decent we turned around and decided to climb it. I changed the display on my watch so that it would show the gradient of the hill as we climbed so I could see just how nasty this thing really was. 99% of the time I tend to stay seated on climbs because I prefer to keep my cadence steady and reserve some strength for the rest of the ride instead of standing up and getting real physical with it and expending a lot of energy. The climb didn't give me much of a choice, If I didn't stand up I was going to be going backwards. After I stood up and made a couple of peddle strokes my rear tires started skidding out from underneath me. I had to stand up in order to peddle but if I stood up I didn't have enough weight on my back tire for it to get traction. I looked down at my watch and saw 23%, 27% 35% and finally 37%! I tried to confirm this gradient on Map My Ride's website where you can map a stretch of road and it will show you the profile of what you've mapped out along with the gradient of the hills but I found that Map My Ride won't show you anything over 20%. So I'm going to have to trust what my watch was showing me.

I have no idea what the true gradient of that climb was but I do know that I've never seen a hill that steep, climbed a hill that steep or even though that it was legal to have a road in a neighborhood that steep. Luckily it was really only about a tenth of a mile long or I wouldn't have made it.