75 miles in Jan?

This past week was the longest week of training I’ve had so far. I guess it was only the third week of this year, but I ended up with 11 workouts and a total of 14.5 hours of training. I swam about 1200 meters on Wed, Thurs, and Friday while focusing strictly on form and breathing. I lifted weights with my trainer on Mon, wed, and Friday. I did speed work (running) on Tuesday and a tempo run on Thursday. I also road the trainer on Tuesday and Thursday nights and did a long bike ride outside on Saturday.

The best workout to speak of was the long ride. I don’t think many of us had been on the bike outside for more than 40ish miles since October’s Jack/Back. Somehow, we ended up with a nice day in the low 50s on Saturday in January. Jeff and I decided to do a 75 mile ride (recognizing it was very early in the season… if it even is the season yet). Several people joined up but broke off for various reasons as the ride continued. We kept the tempo down and treated it as a base building ride. Little did we know, it was going to be a windy day. Somewhere around mile 60, we turned right onto a very rough road that would lead us about 4 miles, directly into the wind, to the start of the last 3 climbs (leave it to Jeff to place the last three biggest climbs in the last 10 miles of the ride, he likes a challenge); I don’t think with all our effort that we pushed our bikes much faster than 13mph into this headwind either. Anyway, it turned out being a fantastic workout this early in the year (especially after 10 other moderate to hard effort workouts during the week). We averaged 16.2mph (very slow for our group actually, but the wind killed us and this was base building) and climbed nearly 4,900 feet. I didn’t hurt as bad as expected after the ride; however, I still took all of Sunday off for a full recovery and woke up Monday to start it all over again.