Saturday was my first "long" ride for the training. I put "long" in quotations because 50 miles has become the norm for Kati and I. We normally won't even venture out on a Saturday morning anymore for anything less than 50 miles. So heading up to Saturday we thought we had it made. We'd wake up, bang out 50 miles and then we would have the remainder of the day to get done what we needed to. The day didn't exactly go as planned.
As you may have heard, this week brought the first signs of winter to Texas. We had snow on Wednesday and the rest of the week was just bitterly cold. The Saturday morning temperature was being predicted at 21 degrees but showed that it would warm up to the mid 30's later in the day. So we waited. And while we waited the wind blew in. By the time we left the house at around 11:00 it was about 36 degrees with a 20mph wind coming out of the south.
While training for the Half Ironman we rode in some pretty crazy windy days. One day Kati even got blown over while waiting at a stop light. Pretty brutal winds. We just learned to deal with it. Kati, being the scientific minded person that she is, made peace with the wind by explaining to herself all the good things that the wind does and how important it is to the ecosystem. I just learned to laugh at it. What else can you do while your pedaling to keep a 15mph pace down a hill that you would normally be coast down at 25mph? It's either laugh or cry and I think I made the right choice. Little did I know that this mental training is something that could be lost as fast as muscular training. I just didn't have the mental strength to deal with the wind anymore.
If wind was the only problem we had to face that day then the ride wouldn't have been all that bad but there we extenuating circumstances.
Kati and I bought ourselves some early Christmas presents on Friday night. We ventured to REI and got each of us a Garmin Forerunner 305 and the cadence sensor to go along with it. A brief explanation on these is that they will give you all the information that you could ever want to know about your workout. Distance, elevation, gradient of the hill you're climbing, heart rate, speed and averages for all the above, just to name a few of it's features. It's truly insane just how much information it records. I told my coach that it gives more information than I want him to have. All that being said you can only imagine how complicated the thing could be to get to function properly and accurately. We spent most of Friday night and Saturday morning trying to get all the settings right and trying to decide what 12 pieces of information we wanted to see on the three screens that we could scroll through during the ride and run that morning.
At the beginning of the ride Kati caught up with me at a stoplight and said that here cadence and heart rate weren't working and that she hadn't set the Auto Pause (that makes it so that the watch automatically stops the timer when you stop instead of continuing the timer while your at a stoplight, thus, messing up all your averages). So we stopped and got that figured out. Or so we thought. It wasn't until I saw her at the end of the workout that I found out that neither her HR or cadence worked the entire time. Frustrating!
I read somewhere once that going into a 10mph headwind can take you from 20mph to 16mph with the same effort on your part. But not even this can explain my horrible ride that day. I have never averaged this bad of a speed. Ever! Some of it I will chalk up to the wind and some blame gets to go into the fatigue category from the week's workouts but I am praying that most of the fingers get pointed at the watch and to some setting that I don't have right. This average was so bad that I won't even put it down in text in hopes that by not doing so will make it so that it didn't really happen. If I had never done any other race or road rally before then I would have a much easier time thinking that the cyclometers that I've had in the past were really that off on their speed and distance. Considering that I have calibrated both our computers on a treadmill, they just can't be that off. But Kati and I have done too many races with set distances for this to be the case.
What I need now is a good ride day where there is very little wind. I need this for two reasons. One reason is because I really need a mental boost right now and the other is to see if this watch is really functioning correctly. On my way home from my Sunday morning ride I turned the watch on to see if it was reading the same speed that the speedometer in the car was reporting and they were nearly identical. So my thought is that either the average has some setting that is not right or that maybe the Auto Pause got turned off some how during my ride on Saturday but my average on Sunday was pretty crap also.
If nothing is malfunctioning other than me then you might as well put a toe tag on my foot because this race is going to kill me.
2 comments:
Just like David told me last night, "if you were stellar confident at this point, you probably would answer to the name of Chrissie Wellington or Craig Alexander." We learned last winter that Texas is windy at this time of year and it will just take some mental training to get that edge back. I don't think you've given off an overly pessimistic tone at all, but if you would have wrote this Saturday I'm willing to bet the tone would be much different. How about this: I'll keep telling you "you can do this; David will train us and we will be prepared" and you tell me the same thing because I think we will need to hear these words often over the next 5 months.
Of all the long training weekends in LoneStar prep which one do you remember the most? That brutally cold and windy White Rock ride with me and Fred! Why is that? Because it sucked? Yes. Because it made you stronger? Most definitely!!!
I had one more thought about your 305. I wonder if your speed sensor/magnet is not calibrated right and is somehow interfering with the GPS? I don't have the speed/cadence sensor and I've never had an accuracy problem. You might try to Google this issue?
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