Monday, May 21, 2007

Ahh, getting toasted and eating humble pie...



This in some ways relates to the previous post regarding time. Some would support the idea of moderate workouts most of the time supplemented with some big weekends/time off. This weekend was far from epic, but as a build, it was pretty successful. Little hard run (8.5 miles) on saturday led me to a slightly difficult sunday.

My buddy Tim just graduated from Seminary, and his brother-in-law came to town to hang out as well as to put me through the paces on a 45-mile moderately fast-paced ride in the "rolling" hill of central KY. Rolling! What a bunch of crap. Anyhow we crushed the first 1.5 hrs at an average pace of 21.5 mph, and took a quick stop to refill water and get a little bit of food in our bodies. I decided on the way back that 45 was preferable to 60 miles, so I took a "shortcut." While Quentin was definitely the fitter of us, even he was dog-cussing those ridiculously long and steep hills on KY state route 1981. Wow, I was in pain. I actually had to get out of my big ring to be able to survive. I don't normally do that either. I live in Lexington. Tim lives in Nicholasville (a slightly redneck town, but a peaceful burg nonetheless). I never thought coming into the outskirts of Nich-vegas would look so good to me. It was beautiful.

Now for the humble pie: I have yet to actually wreck on my bike. I will maintain that assertion even after yesterday. So as one is prone to do on the bike, we run a lot of stop signs, and expect people in cars (if we arrive at said 4-way stop at the same time) to let us go first. This worked great until the second to last stop sign. Quentin was leading and I was pretty close on his wheel. Dude in white truck pulls up, barely beats us to the intersection, and I think we're going for it. Quentin said afterwards that he (quentin) did not give dude the confident look, and that it was his fault. So dude goes right in front of us, and quentin locks up his brakes. I lock up mine, but my back wheel starts sliding out to the side, and I just nudge the back of quentin's wheel. I fall over, clipped in. Beautiful. So I'm on the ground and can't unclip my right foot. Picture a ladybug holding up a scaled down bicycle, writing around. I'm trying to get it undone and that bastard quentin says "are you ok?" "Ya" I say. "Are you embarrassed?" Hell yes, I'm embarrassed. Best kind of accident though, nobody's hurt, just a little bit of getting laughed at by people sitting in their cars. Oh well. Good weekend. Not really even all that sore. Guess I need to train harder.

Next: do I do the Miami Man 70.3? I just don't know. Time is tight these days.

2 comments:

Bill said...

I found out the hard way about what a bitch those central KY hills are.

On Saturday I did the Taylorsville Lake 1/2 IM distance race. The bike leg circled the lake and had 5400+ feet of climbing.

Now mind you, out here in SW KY, I couldn't find a route with 5400 feet of climbing in 100 miles, much less 56.

Glad to hear you made it safe. All of my bike "incidents" have been exactly like that. 2mph and falling over. Those are worse for the ego than any amount of road rash, I suspect.

Mark said...

Sounds like a great training day! I think if you haven't fallen over while clipped in then you simply haven't ridden enough :P

And YES, you do MiamiMan this year. Oh, you also need to do the Little Smokies half-iron race THIS Sunday with Erik and I! Yes, I'm calling you out punk! Bring it!!

http://www.hfpracing.com/races/smokies/index.php