This is why, when I win and place in my age class (the one and only thing to look forward to in the “golden years”), and finish in the top 3rd of the rest of the field, I feel pretty darn good about myself. I do indeed train for these races, but I never had the opportunity to do serious training indoors. My training indoors has always been one of desperation – where I desperately fight to keep my fitness level from being decimated by too many Christmas cookies and the winter insulating blubber that always seems to wrap itself around my waistline.

Opening Global Ride Training Center has changed all that. Not only did we build the facility specifically for indoor training, but for the last 3 years I’ve been soaking up knowledge about cycling training, Heart Zones, power meters, metabolic testing and all the tools readily available to any athlete that cares about their progress. This combination has probably been partially to blame for my first blog post here – where I made the insane decision to ride the first 5 stages of the Giro (provided that Lance agreed to give me a head start on the road ahead of him).

So naturally, I’ve been hard at it for one big reason – I don’t want to fail the Livestrong foundation, and I don’t want to fail myself. Oh yeah, and one other thing… the natural desire to avoid pain. Having ridden in the dolomites in ‘06 before I had this facility and the knowledge about real training, I know what it feels like riding there without being properly prepared. At the time, I thought I was ready. But after day 1 in the Italian Alps, it was abundantly clear – I was in deep doo-doo… the word clueless came to mind quite a bit. Even though I appeared to be suffering less than many of the others, the sufferage was stellar.

That was just 3 years ago, and those memories are like it was 3 days ago. I did indeed finish the rides, and it clearly made me stronger – to the point where I was crushing my training routes at home with 20% improvements in time or speed. For two weeks after my last foray in the dolomites I rode like Superman – it was the closest to an “out of body” experience I have ever had. It was like I was watching myself kill climbs that used to make me cry for my momma. There was however, a steep price to pay for these results. We climbed 7,000 to 10,000 feet per day – it was like a crash course in mega-climbing. Now I know why the pros live over there during the race season.

I know that the only way to avoid a repeat painfest (especially considering we will be covering almost twice as many miles) is to train smarter and harder. The more pain I endure here, the less I will meet out there. I usually say “train smarter, not harder”… good advice for the average cyclists and athlete in general. However, if you’re going to the Giretto, and you have less than 2 months to get it together, you better do both!

The picture above is of my Garmin Edge 705. This is one of two display screens I use while I’m riding. This one sort of shows the ride totals and averages, while the other one I normally keep set to show the “real time” data while I’m riding. This unit is the bomb, and I don’t know how I’d train without it! I have maps for both Italy and the US… and well, I’ll cover that more on another post. The pic above shows the stats from our ride on Sunday.

Getting back to my fatigue factor, as I looked at our time, I realized that since we didn’t originally plan on more than 30 miles, we did bring anything to “refuel” with during the ride. Having something to eat 1.5 hrs prior to the ride, put me at 4 hrs since the last fuel break – not advisable for endurance riding. I should have taken something with me to eat at about mile 25 or so.

So, given a fueling mistake (apparently the same mistake made by Contador during this weekend’s Paris Nice race), I was pretty happy with how we did, and how we felt. Now I’m trying to decide if I should rest a few days before I start hammering for the next 6 weeks or not. I’ve not had more than 1 day off since around Christmas, so I would probably benefit from a few days off from training.

Oh yeah, the best news of all.. NO HIP PAIN!!!!