Thursday, June 3, 2010

Go Figure

So I've recently started training smarter, much smarter. The layout of the week is easy Monday, hard Tuesday, easy distance on Wednesday (distance depends on work), hard Thursday, easy Friday, and hard on the weekend. Pretty freakin simple eh. My day off would be either Monday or Friday depending on how I feel and what the goal for the week is.

This weekend is the fourth o-cup of the circuit so I was hoping to get some more time on the mountain bike than I have been getting previous weeks but the forecast is rain, rain, and some more rain. Without work, today would have been an ideal day for a pre-ride of the course, but that was a no-go. So the plan was to head over to Mountainview and Park in Grimsby and do some hill work, I finally got around to flipping my stem and somehow there is now a small gap between the top piece of the headset and head tube? I'll take her in to Liberty! tomorow and see what's up. It doesn't seem bad at all but the two main reasons I opted to ride the mountain bike instead were that it was going to rain (and it did) so the water and grit would be free-flowing right in there and probably cost me a headset and also the fact that I would be going up hills, which means I'd be blasting back down them and anything that can go wrong probably will at 80km/h.

I was heading out to DeCew rd. to do some hill work there but the sky was pitch black North so I stayed on the short but sweet hill on Port Robinson. I did 10 hill reps, 2 sets of 5 with about 1min easy spin between reps and 5min between sets. They weren't straight hill reps, I started at the bottom in the big ring and about third biggest cog with a high cadence. Every marker on the hill (about 10s apart) I would shift up one gear and push harder until I got to the final marker which was a warning sign for a new set of lights up ahead where I would be feeling the burn quite a bit. This is where I would upshift, stand and mash the pedals as hard as I could and try to hold that effort without passing out before the set of lights. Rain started to come down hard on the last rep, felt refreshing.

All this to say that I had an awesome workout because I felt fresh after yesterday's easy day, it's amazing what rest can do for you.

2 comments:

  1. So did you get downpoured on?
    for the headset, loosen the stem and tighten the top cap bolt down until the headset is a bit too tight, then loosen it off a bit. In the process it will make everything go back together, granted you have the same number of spacers on there. Then just adjust it based on play/free turning-ness as you probably know how.

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  2. Oh yeah, the rain was actually hurting at one point on my way home. It felt almost like hail.

    I took it to Lib! last night, De Cal and Derek said that the little gap was fine. No pieces are missing, it might have been there all along.

    Thanks for the help bud

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