There are fools in them hills!!

What a tough ride today. I planned on taking us out for some hills to get a good work out for the upcoming Tour de London race. Three of us headed out on what was a planned 46-48 mile route. I knew I was in for a long day when my legs were weak on the first climb. I need to figure out why my strength is fluctuating so much each week. I have one good week, then a bad week and so on. That is not good since the race is going to be on my bad week!!

I managed to climb all of this hills with out walking. There were a few places that I wished I had a triple ring up front or even a compact set up, but no, I was limping along on my old 8 spd gearing. I keep telling myself what does not kill me, makes me stronger. I think my legs were disagreeing today! Above you can see the log for the ride. The gray section is the elevation profile. It showed right at 2100 foot of elevation gain for 54 1/2 miles. We did average 17 mph. I was happy with that for how bad the hills hurt.

As we were finishing with the route I had planned everything was going good so I came up with this dumb idea to skip a turn and add a few more miles. I figured they were flat miles and should not be that hard. Considering we were just finishing up a long stretch running 24 mph, I actually was not feeling too bad. That was until the first little grade we came up. It seemed like a monster, but was not much at all. All three of us worked it through fairly well, that is until the last turn toward home. This is a long stretch of road that looks flat, but really is going up the whole way. Add that to a good head wind and we were all hurting. At one point I thought I was going to actually just fall over. Some how we managed to struggle home.

It was good to get the extra miles in after all the hard hills. It was also good to push myself past my comfort zone. This all should help in my building process. I just hope I can work out some good legs for the race.