You’ve probably noticed by now that I’m pretty obsessed with my times up a climb that I live near. High Grade is a good test of fitness and has been my measuring-stick over the last year and a half. The wind can influence times a bit, but I still like to use it as a point of reference.

On my climb today, my time was 59:54 – which wasn’t very spectacular. It just amuses me to think of how HARD I tried to break an hour last year, and never came within 3 minutes. Now, it seems like on any given day – even with a headwind and average legs like today, breaking an hour is almost a sure thing.

On the steepest part of the climb, I was in a 19 tooth cog holding just under 10mph. Last year, I would climb this section in my 25 tooth (granny-gear) and struggle to grind out 4-6mph while thrashing around all over the bike. Guess that’s called taking it to a new level.

The only racing going on this weekend was an 11k time trial north of Boulder. I couldn’t see driving for over an hour to do a 20 minute race on my one day to do some real riding. I opted to stay closer to home and do some training in the hills, hoping to stockpile some good climbing miles for the Tour of Utah coming up later this month.

I headed up High Grade. Got my second fastest time, but didn’t feel so great. The wind was pretty harsh at times, too. Missed the hour mark by 18 seconds. Rats! Good thing I didn’t go to the TT. My legs sucked today. Somewhat sore, and feeling very empty. You can see from my heart rate data that I only averaged 166, should have been up in the mid to high 170’s. A sure sign that my legs are tired and not able to work my cardio system as hard as it could be. Ahhh, must be build phase…

This is always a mentally difficult period of training to go through. You ride and ride, but get slower and slower. As the training load increases, you dig the hole deeper and deeper. Overall, it’s a great thing – because you time a rest period before an important event and let your body supercompensate and POP, you’re flying. Supercompensation is a cool principle, it basically means that you overload your body through training, back off, and it will over compensate to handle even more load than you’ve put on it. That’s the theory anyway… It’s just tough to grind through days like today, gotta keep the big picture in mind.

Miles – 605
Hours – 33:48

Zone 1 – 61%
Zone 2 – 15%
Zone 3 – 7%
Zone 4 – 11%
Zone 5 – 6%

YTD:
Miles – 1809
Hours – 130:24