… and the what? … and the psyched, the sore, the sorry and the satisfied. Let’s start with the psyched. It was just me and my Buddy Bill again (see my previous post) on my outside training ride. I’m always psyched to ride with Bill. We still had to wear arm & leg warmers, base layers, long fingered gloves and the works as spring is not as much “Springing” here as it is Sputtering. This week we’ve had snow and consistently low temperatures all week… and of course our typical gray Pittsburgh ambiance; not very motivating to say the least. However, this is a “proof of concept” as much as it is a charity ride right – having horrid conditions that prevent me from doing real training outside is why Cycling Fusion was inspired in the first place. This is the exact condition that we want to use to prove that we can indeed get ready for something of the magnitude of the Giro by using our combined indoor/outdoor training principals.

Despite the lack of teamates and the weather though, I was undaunted and ready to see if my strength and interval training indoors for the last week was going to pay off. Within the first 15 minutes we hit our first climb – a steep switchback that would put us both over our anaerobic threshold for more than 2 minutes. It hurt, but wasn’t unfamiliar. From that point on, it was a climb fest of major proportions. The hills kept on coming, short, steep and relentless. This is the sore part – my legs and hips were feeling immediately sore and yet my aerobic engine was strong – so we pressed on. Had I not forced myself to use high resistance training indoors, my soreness would have been suffering of the major proportions kind. As it was, I could still push through it, and do it at a higher speed than ever before. We averaged 15.1 mph in the “climb fest” section of the ride! I was stoked…sore, but stoked.

We finally hit our first straight and almost flat section, and this is where the sorry came in. I got to thinking about Raquel and how she must be feeling now – virtually overnight becoming a cancer victim. She was the one that first showed me just how good indoor training can be if done correctly. She was the 5th rider of the Giretto, to join our proof of concept and the fight against cancer, and now she is who we ride for. It made me want to ride just that much harder.

As I cranked it up, I saw my Buddy Bill take the front to give me a rest, and I realized he was the strongest I’ve ever seen him as well. Since he began teaching at the club, and taking part as a student in our 12 week indoor cycling training program, he has hit new levels of fitness. Here we are in early April, and we are killin’ it! This is where the satisfied hit me. I was feeling so good, I decided to just keep up the pace, and see just how fast we might ride this new route.

At our last traffic light where we were forced to slow down, I checked our average speed, and it was 16.3. I told Bill despite the fact that it was uphill the rest of the way back to Global Ride, I wanted to finish above 16. He told me to just go, and if I dropped him not to slow down. Bill is humble that way, as he still found it in himself to pace me at least once during our sprint back the club. We finished with an average of 16.1 mph, with 2900 ft of climbing in just 28 miles. This shattered every previous “climbing route” record I ever had, even on shorter courses. This might not be much for some riders, but for two old guys in their 50s who used to average 11-13 mph on our PA steeps, this was as good as it gets. Oh yeah that’s the good. The bad? Well, my legs complained for the next 12 hrs, but it was worth it.