The fire returneth

So one of the all time great feelings is when one has not been in the pool for a while, swims hardish, and feels pretty good. (I was able to get an employee to take a picture of me, which you can see)

I also ran into a dude who did Escape from Alcatraz last year and chatted with him about it at Gold's last night. That was encouraging and got me fired up to get some races in. In other news, due to their general dumbassness, Gold's will henceforth be referred to as GloboGym.

If a gym chooses to put tv screens and speakers all around the place, I'm ok with that. I'm even ok with them playing music, albeit far too loudly on said speakers. But if these boundaries are crossed, some bastions of decency must remain. Lil bow wow and jojo are not to be played under any circumstances. It's just wrong. And what's with all this teeny-bopper garbage? It's a gym people. Get in. Work hard. Enjoy yourself. Get out. Pretty simple concept. It would be really nice if they could put something decent on these tv's, like Lance crushing some people or some old Iron War footage. All these things, and the commercials have to stop.

The confluence of this nonsense has me extremely excited about the prospect of a new YMCA to be built in east Lex Angeles. Oh it will be sweet.

Apparently, I lack bike fitness...

The weather had been crappy here for about two weeks and I hadn't gotten time to ride the bike much lately. Thus, sunday was the time to take care of such things. And it was a great ride. I'm still not fit in that my HR is a lot higher (I think) on the bike relative to my run numbers. But a large portion of that is likely attributable to the lack of sport-specific training (again, relative to my running).

So the ride was great. It was 36 miles in sub 2 hours. Just working on slowly building time in the saddle. Great day, enjoyed being outside in the nice spring air. The only problem is that roughly an hour after I got done, I was cramping and my legs were totally sapped. I went to stand up and a pain the likes of which I hope to never experience shot down the inside of my left leg. Apparently my hip adductor was cramping (Thank you Amber for saving me from prolonged pain in knowing how to stretch that thing). In case you're curious, the picture above represents the approximate level of pain I experienced in that 5 minutes. And yes, that is the other guy's foot in that tender area.

So the issue I believe is partially bike fitness, but also related to the strength difference between my two legs. I've been trying to strengthen the one that has had the 4 surgeries, but it feels like I'm running into a wall. This shifts priorities a bit to really working on ironing this out. I don't want to be fighting injuries while training. It also really hinders performance. When the left leg is good, i run faster and bike faster ( I think I swim straighter too.). Regardless, Sam needs some help.

Finally

Ah yes. It's about time. Can anybody say bike rides for months? It's gonna be a good summer.