The veloway thing looks pretty cool. We have something similar but it's only a mile long and there are always people walking their dogs on it. Bradley Wiggins trains there though apparantly so it can't be that bad. I'll have to try and get down to it at some point cos it'll be good for doing interval sessions or time trials on a consistent course.

Pacing's gonna be mega important. It's important enough in a single swim/bike/run race but when you're mixing the three you've got to know where your weaknesses are and know exactly what pace to set to leave you with enough at the end to not crash and burn, but so much that you have lost a ton of time early on saving yourself.

I checked out the website, it seems it's for pretty experienced cyclists, which makes sense as it's 550 miles. I'm guessing there'll be pelotons forming along the way that it'd be best to keep up with, or even just try and find a few other riders to form a small group with.

The only long ride I've done is the MS 150, which is from Houston to Austin - the long route is 177 miles, I did about 155, over 2 days. I thought it was more or less a piece of cake. Both that ride and this one, they have regular stops with food, gatorade, time to rest, etc. I didn't really draft in that one at all, it's a REALLY huge event, with thousands and thousands of people so I was basically just passing people all day.

My experience in mid-size events is that if you don't find someone to ride with at the beginning who's about your speed, you ride alone. People who are faster than you, you won't catch up with, obviously. People who are slower, won't catch up with you.

But anyway I've always rode a ton by myself so the specter of riding 80 miles without being able to draft someone doesn't bother me much, although of course it'll be easier if I can.

More weight lifting

Exercise	Reps
HBBS	65x5, 85x5, 105x5, 115x5, 115x5
Bench	65x5, 85x5, 105x5, 95x5, 95x5
DL	115x5, 135x5, 135x5
Pullups (assisted)	4, 4, 4

This sounds really cool. Expecting an awesome TR.

You make this sound easy. I've thought about trying this but man, that seems like a long way.

The MS150 is within reach of almost anyone who can ride a bike, seriously. Big ole fatties ride it with regularity. I think the shortest route is about 125-130 miles (65-ish both days). There are stops every 12-15 miles with food, refreshment, shade. If you get tired they will haul your ass forward a stop or two, no problem. Also, you have *all day* to do it. I think they start sweeping people up around sundown, so like 8am to 6pm probably, 10 hours.

That said, you will enjoy it a lot more if you have some miles on the bike. I did about 1500 miles of riding during the fall/spring before the MS150. I started with pretty low volume and ramped up to about 100 miles/week by the end. If you do this, it's really a piece of cake. By far I had a harder time doing the "Easter Hill Country Tour" which was 3 days of riding through the hilly terrain of central texas (out by Kerrville I guess mostly). That was honesty very hard and it was made harder by the fact that I was doing minimalist camping at the same time (i.e. I'd camp at night, ride into the starting position in the morning, then come back to the tent at night again)

I think you can also basically do one day of the MS150. No one is gonna know if you sign up for the full thing but only ride the first day.

From what I see on the map, it looks like you ride down 71. Is this right? Seems risky. Or is there some sort of parallel fm road or something.

Was in Dallas for the weekend to play poker (WSOP circuit event in Durant, OK). Managed to get a ride in saturday morning. Hooked up with a friend of mine for a regular ride with a group that he does triathalon stuff with. They divided into 2 groups, one short ride ("1 hour" the guy said), I went with the other group which was doing 35 miles. It was me and 2 other people, and they went sloooow. I was kind of disappointed - I'd planned to tack on another 9mi around the lake but I was already late for lunch so I skipped it.

This is possibly the slowest ride I've ever been on of this length, including ones I rode by myself at the very beginning. I don't think I still have records but I think this is slower than the 40 mile ride I did a few years ago where I totally hit the wall and limped home at 10mph after riding 2/3 of the way.

Time: 2:34
Distance: 35 mi
Avg Power: 125 (148 normalized)
Avg HR: 125
Avg Speed: 13.7 mph

The poker was pretty ****ing awful. I played 1/2 NLHE waiting for a seat at 1/2/5 PLO8. I finally get a seat and have played an orbit and a half, playing 1-2 hands, when a big hand comes up. I have AA35 double-suited which is about as big as O8 hands get preflop. EP opens to $15, several calls before me, I pot it, 2 callers. Flop comes 46J with 2 of my suit, which although I don't have much of a made hand is pretty much gin for my hand. Checks to me, I put the rest in, get called by both. I miss all the high stuff, but make a low.

High ends up getting awarded to 2 pair (I was so amazingly good on the flop). I turn my hand over to get the low. I'm told there's no low. I do a double-take and re-check the board, I've definitely mis-read before. But yeah, there's a low, and it's mine. I say so,

The dealers says "no, I mean, there's no low in this game"

I'd been seated at a PLO high game by mistake (I wasn't even on the list for it). There's no placard and no one had said anything. Hands weren't really going to showdown that much so I hadn't seen anything yet which would have made it clear what was going on, although in retrospect there was one pre-flop all in that I thought had a terrible terrible call in it (like 99JQ) but, ****, that's why I was there in the first place.

Well, oh well, what can you do. I felt like a right pussy for not berating anyone about it but at least I did make them put me at the top of the plo8 list (which was like 30 deep for seats at ONE ****ING TABLE) and eventually I got a seat there. I proceded to basically never get dealt anything for 4 or 5 more hours and left when my friend wanted to go.

Maybe, I dunno. Presumably it'll be OK. I've ridden in plenty of dodgy spots, as long as there are a lot of bikes and support vehicles it'll be OK.

I keep meaning to write a program that will do a better job of graphing this than the one I have (Training Peaks WKO+) but for now it'll have to do (because beer and lazy)



It took me a while of staring at this to understand it myself so I'll try to explain best as I can.

Each bar represents 4 weeks. The height of the bar is the peak power output you sustained during that 4 week period. There are 4 seperate graphs in this window, each of which is for a different length of time.

Take the set on the far right for example, there are 5 bars there increasing in height. The whole set is a graph of how much power I can sustain for 20 minutes at a time. Each bar represents the best 20 minutes I did in that 4 week period. Does that make sense?

The bars on the far left graph look weird because many of them are *too low to be on the graph*. Partly this is because this is my weak point, and partly because for the periods shown here, I did not do a lot of peak-power training. The two sets of graphs on the right show the most steady improvement (the blip on the 5-minute graph is basically that all I did during that period was long slow steady rides). I'm pretty happy that the graph goes up - that's about all I care about.

The massive beat is that I have this selected as "female" because otherwise a lot of the bars don't show. However - the graph for "male" says that my 20 minute power is within sort of standard "cat 5 range" and my 5 minute is nearly so. I don't think 5s shows up at ALL on that graph.

Oh and the units of the graph are "watts per kg" so as to sort of normalize across different body weights.

Horrible session today. I don't think I posted this week's schedule but basically today is max-power intervals, 3 sets of 3on/3off, then rest 8 min, then do it again. First set was about 350 watts and they basically decreased 25-40 watts every interval until the last one was like 240 watts, which is ridic low. Partly was an issue with terrain - there are several very tight loops that are pretty much impossible to pedal through, and I got caught having to do intervals in them a few times at the end, meaning there'd be 10-15s segments with little to no pedalling. But anyway, yeah, I really was not feelin it and it was hard.

The last cycle of this program, these intervals were only 2 minutes and even then they were hell. 3 minutes is a really long ass time. Anyway, hopefully they'll go better with more experience.

Supposed to lift weights tonight, not sure if I will, tired and sore.

Time: 1:12
Distance: 20 mi
Avg Power: 164 (211 normalized)
Avg HR: 144
Avg Speed: 16.7 mph

Are you doing the new competitor program? I have the Time Crunched Cyclist book, and I did the new century program last summer using heart rate. I did get to be a faster, stronger rider but since I've done no riding the last 2.5 months I'm pretty much back to my base. I've never been anywhere close to your wattage output tho. Good luck, the TDR looks awesome but I would hate to try to fund raise $2500.

Yeah I did the experienced century early this year, switched to "new competitor" starting in january.

The fund-raising is not going so well. I am hoping to get some people from work to do it (there is a huge cycling culture and several pro/am racers at work)

Exercise	Reps
LBBS	65x5, 85x5, 105x5, 125x5, 125x5, 115x5
Shoulder Press	35x5, 55x5, 65x5, 60x5, 55x5
DL	115x5, 135x5, 155x5
Bench	85x5, 105x5, 105x5, 95x5

First time in quite a while that I've been able to ride the regular loop around my neighborhood in the morning. This morning was quite temperate - about 60F, and sunny. Really nice.

Today's exercise was "OU" intervals (Over-Under). This set was 9 minutes with 6 minute rest. The 9 minutes is broken up into alternating unders (2 minutes, Steady State level) and overs (1 minute, Climbing Repeat level) repeated until the 9 minutes is up. The last 1 minute was quite the ****. Looking at my spreadsheet I can see that I over-estimated how much effort was supposed to go into them. I was doing 240ish for the unders and 300+ for the overs, should be 240ish for unders and 250-265 for overs.

As a result, the average for my working sets was higher than it should be, although, like usual it trailed off the further I got in. I misread the time on the last set and was a minute into it, thinking it was a result period. Oh well.

Anyway:

Time: 1:20
Distance: 22.2 mi
Avg Power: 173 (201)
Avg HR: 148
Avg Speed: 16.2 mph

Have you turned off auto lap on the Garmin 500? One thing I did to help me keep track of time was to turn off auto lap and have a page with lap time, cadence and heart rate only. I would hit the lap button for each time interval, kept me from having to try to remember when I started the interval.

I was using a training program I made. This particular one does this
3min interval
3min interval
3min interval
6min rest
and repeats that 3 times. So it beeps at me when it's time to change. I didn't catch the display that said what the upcoming interval was, and I'd mis-counted, so I thought I was done.

It didn't actually become clear until about 45s into the interval when it told me my heart rate was too low, then I realized the mistake.

In these workout/training modes, there are special screens, and they will actually tell you which interval you're on, but I wasn't looking at one at the time.

I see, I haven't done much with creating workouts on my Garmin. I'll have to look into that, sounds better than what I was doing. I just got the 500 for Xmas, was using an older Forerunner last year.

If you create workouts, I recommend using the Garmin Training Center software. It's not perfect (in fact I find it pretty annoying) but easier than doing it on the device itself, imo.

When you use the workout stuff, there are 2 extra screens you can cycle through on the device (I think they're also modifiable). I don't mess with them much because for the most part all I care about is
* heart rate
* time
* power - 3s
* power - 30s

The 3s power number bounces around a lot but lets me know "about" what I'm putting out right now. The 30s number lets me know if I'm actually maintaining that.

Had to ride in the afternoon because the woman was busy mid-morning and early morning it was raining. Worried about it getting dark so I decided to make it 1.5 hours instead of 2 (the range was 1.5-2 so that's fine)

More OU intervals - same as the last ones except only 5 minutes rest in between.

Time: 1:38
Distance: 26.7 mi
Avg Power: 176 (207)
Avg HR: 145
Avg Speed: 16.4 mph

Sort of my standard sunday group ride. Nice weather so a lot of people showed up, which USUALLY means it's slower. People were bringin it today though, and on average I think it was a little tougher than usual. Brutal headwind for a lot of the middle third of it.

Time: 2:38
Distance: 40 mi
Avg Power: 150 (192)
Avg HR: 145
Avg Speed: 15.6 mph

Weight lifting today. Trying to find a schedule that works for me. I guess one day is going to be monday, the other will be thurs or fri, depending on my schedule. Weekends are impossible - my legs are often just jelly on sunday already.

Exercise	Sets
Bench	65x5, 95x5, 110x5, 110x5, 110x5
HBBS	65x5, 95x5, 135x5, 125x5, 125x5
OHP	45x5, 55x5, 65x5, 60x5, 55x5
DL	125x5, 145x5, 165x5

Here is the coming week's schedule. I've been entering it into my spreadsheet a week at a time - I think it helps me plan the week better because I do more than just glance at it. And sometimes it's a pleasant surprise, like now, when I realize that tomorrow I have a choice between taking a rest day, or doing 45 minutes of easy riding. That sounds pretty easy!

The down side, of course, being the ****storms on thursday and saturday. (3 minute balls-out power intervals)

Day	Exercise
Tues	Rest day or 45 minutes easy spin
Thurs	60-90 min EM with 2 x [3 x 3min SEPI (3 min RBI)] (8 min RBS)
Sat	90-120 min EM with 2 x [3 x 3min SEPI (3 min RBI)] (6 min RBS)
Sun	120-150 min EM or group ride

Did my light duty ride. Stats aren't important, it was about an hour, about 14.5 mph, avg power around 135-140.

Ended up doing some very light running. When I got home my wife showed me this thing my son had written on school. It was like "what would you like to do more" or something like that and his answer was "spend more time together as a family". This is kinda LOL because we actually hang out all weekend every weekend and probably 3-4 out of 5 week nights, but whatever.

Anyway, the wife and the boy were headed out to a sort of fun-walk-run thing that his school does every other week. I had declined to go but since apparently we don't spend enough time together, I decided to come along. He's a good kid.

Anyway, I walked about 2/3 of a mile, ran about a half mile, it started raining and they basically closed it down. I didn't have my heart monitor on or anything. It was pretty easy, but man, even easy running is so much harder than riding a bike. Maybe I do it wrong?


A funny anecdote from yesterday - the boy learned about segregation recently because of MLK day. He told me that my wife and I were lucky that segregation was over because otherwise we wouldn't be able to be married. Apparently he thinks my wife and I are different races because of our skin tones.

Here's me and my wife:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...type=3&theater

Running will get way easier once you've been on a few more runs. Your legs are just programmed for cycling atm and are like "WTF?!" when you start running on them.

Photo doesn't work for me but I'm guessing one of you is just a bit tanned? That's pretty funny.