As I think I've said before, my new goal in life is to get faster. I'm pretty sure that I'm never really going to be fast and that is fine with me. I would like to increase the pace of my mountain biking a bit and generally increase my fitness. Fast is fun and I like fun. :D
Part of the way that I'm achieving this goal is to ride with the fast groups on the Tuesday and Thursday night rides. Now when I say ride with, I really mean start riding with and then fall off the back pretty quickly. The first night I did this, I did a pre-ride with some folks that was blistering, then when the main ride started, the ride got even faster. They were super cool about letting me catch back on. I tend to recover pretty quickly from hard efforts. That is a byproduct of doing so much running this winter I guess.
Thursday I rode with Larry's group. I did okay with them at the beginning, but as the pace steadily picked up, I kept dropping off the back on the climbs. Again, they were amazingly cool about waiting for me. I'm really having to fight the feeling that I'm holding them up or ruining their ride. As a ride leader, I always hated it when people apologized too much for being slow. "Hated it" is not the right term... I wished they wouldn't apologize. I'm going to shut up and just ride as hard as I can to stay on. Larry and the Thursday group were awesome and it inspired me to keep this going.
Nothing in those first two rides with faster groups could prepare me for the ass kicking I got last night. The casual group was a pretty fast one. The faster group was REALLY fast. It was Ricky and Stoner leading. I asked if it was okay if I rode with them and warned them that I might drop off if I couldn't keep up. That didn't take long at all. I always knew those guys were fast. They've lapped me at the races many times and I was always impressed with their speed and skills. Last night was great evidence that we're not even in the same universe in terms of fitness level. I fought the whole ride to keep from saying "sorry" every time they waited for me. I did a few times. I think I only suggested that we part ways 3 or 4 times. They were as kind to me as I try to be with the casual groups that I ride with from time to time. I eventually just said "thanks" when they'd wait for me.
I still feel badly that I'm slowing people up. Like a friend of mine says, "I hate being 'that guy' on a ride." I'm going to keep doing it though. I'll try and rotate groups so that I don't slow anyone up too often. We'll see how it goes.
Purchase of a heartrate monitor this week is another tool that will help. That'll give me an idea of how well I'm doing and where I am in my training. I've wanted one for ages, but there just hasn't been the money for it. A combination of my REI dividend and someone paying me for bike repair services with an REI gift card made the total expenditure about $11. On my solo pre-ride, I kept my heart rate between 145 and 150 for most of the ride. When I was chasing Stoner and Ricky I was in the 155-160 range, with a few bumps up into the mid 160s. I can't really analyze that yet since the software isn't working on either of my computers yet. I'm going to contact Garmin when I finish typing this and get them to help me figure it out.
Sorry for being boring. I tend to write what is in my brain and this was something that had me pondering this morning.
Pete
No comments:
Post a Comment