Saturday. The long bike day. 3 hours. It's been .... years since I've done a 3 hour ride, and I think I've only done ONE 3 hour ride on the trainer and that was a VERY long time ago. I honestly had NO idea how this was going to go.
And it almost didn't happen today! I usually do my workouts early in the morning before the kids get up - get it done before the day gets away from me, especially these longer workouts. But last night The Girl Child snuggled into bed with me (it's been a while since she's done that) so when my alarm went off at 4:30am I promptly turned it off and snuggled back into her. It was also really nice to sleep in (until 8:30 - unheard of!) and I needed it. But .... when to then fit in the 3 hour ride? I was planning on swapping the Saturday/Sunday workouts, and getting up early on Sunday to get this long ride in. But as the day went on, I really wanted to do it per the schedule, even if it meant a late night, and while I had a busy day, I was feeling really good. The Sunday workout is a short one - just an hour, so I can squeeze it in easily at multiple times depending on how I feel. So ... after tucking The Girl into bed, and telling The Boy not to stay up too late playing video games with his buddies, I went down to the basement and started my workout at about 8:20pm.
We were to do 30.0 Muscular Endurance PLUS, which is a 2 hour, 25 minute workout, then tack on an additional 35 minutes to get to the 3 hour mark. Alrighty. I've had 30.0 for a while now but haven't done it, so it was going to be an adventure, and it was a grey zone workout, so it was going to be challenging. One would think that riding the trainer on "the road to nowhere" as Coach Troy calls it would be mind numbing. But this workout seriously FLEW by. The sets get progressively shorter so mentally you feel the time clicking away at a decent clip. I was nailing my zones perfectly and feeling really, really good until the last set. This one was tough - 6x5 minutes, and within each 5' rep, we changed gears every minute and either decreased or increased our cadence accordingly. Mentally, it was great - you broke up the long 30' set into 5' blocks, and those 5' blocks into 1' increments. Beautiful. But this all happens after you've already been riding hard for 2 hours, and this set is challenging - Troy is really pushing us here. This is when I started to hurt a bit - the legs were definitely turning to jello and I felt on the verge of cramping up a few times. But I never did and didn't have to decrease my effort, so I feel pretty great about the first 2:24 of the workout. Then the formal workout ended, and I had to rewind back to the beginning to repeat the first 20' set. This was SO hard to do - I wanted to be done. The people in the video were done!!!!! But .... it was a "suck it up, Buttercup" moment. Back to the beginning I went. At about this time I pretty much lost all feeling in my lower body so I just put myself on autopilot, watched my numbers to make sure I was where I was supposed to be, and kept the legs spinning round and round. I then ff'd to the last 5' sets to finish off the time and nailed the full three hours. THREE HOURS!
I did well with hydration and nutrition - felt strong and solid the entire time, which is great. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to do Suffer-O-Rama (best title ever, no?) tomorrow as I think just walking down the stairs might prove difficult, but thankfully it's a short one. Anyone can suffer for an hour, right?
Thank GOD I did the Squat/Plank A Thon (55/1:40) early this morning, as I'm not sure the legs could do anything resembling a squat right now. Tomorrow's 60 could be ugly. :)
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| 3 hours and nearly 43 miles on the Road to Nowhere |
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