Well, OK… maybe not just like Lance. Nina and I (father/daughter) are indeed ahead of schedule! Chris Charmichael wrote about how Lance was ahead of schedule as he prepared for his first tour event of the season, and well, I at least want to be just like Lance. This Sunday was just our 2nd ride outside since the fall, and we had planned on only 30 miles with some climbing, since last week we did 20 with no climbing. After the first half of the ride, we both felt so good we decided to do the extra 15 miles and “step it up” a bit. Since we put 90% of the climbing at the very end of the ride, we were feeling the fatigue over the last 10 miles.

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!!!!