Fast Improvements

Improvements are coming fast, which is what I was secretly hoping for. I did two 4:30am runs of 5 miles this week and neither was great. It was in the 80's even at that hour and my legs were still whooped it seems from the death march last Sunday. It is Saturday morning and I decided to do the same 75 miler I did 2 weeks ago. I am much stronger now, I dare say I almost felt like a cyclist on my ride. I put in a medium+ effort for the whole ride, I didn't want to hammer it nor did I want to relax, so I kept my effort just above the comfort zone. Believe me, I was putting in a decent effort. My improvements over 2 weeks are pretty good: my time dropped from 4:54 to 4:24, a 30 minute gain!!!; average speed went from 14.9 to 16.7; and my average heart rate only went up 2 beats from 138 to 140. This kind of improvement makes me happy. I know it won't continue at that pace but I can use all the leaps and bounds I can get right now. There are no big climbs on this route but I didn't allow myself to shift out of my big chain ring for the whole ride. There is 1/2 mile grind with a 6-8% slope in the last 3 miles that was kind of hard though. I thought that was a cool looking old church so I took a picture, it is now the Holmdel Historical Society, according to the sign out front. Click here to see the Garmin data for the ride.

I signed up last minute for a long course sprint tomorrow morning in Long Branch. It's a short ocean swim, 20 mile bike, and a 5 mile run. I live about 15 miles from from race start so I'm going to bike there, race, and bike home. That'll give me 50 miles of riding, with the middle 20 at a hard race pace. Starts @ 7am so I probably need to be biking there by 5am...geez, that sucks. You don't get to be as handsome as me by missing beauty sleep!