Piling up the DNS's

Well, maybe not piling but my most recent bagging of Housatonic Hills makes that two DNS's on the year or for those dollar-conscious readers out there, $58 in pre-reg down the tubes. (Winding Trails mtb race being the other) The weather, in a word, sucks. I feel like we live in Seattle for crissakes. It looked like it was going to be solid rain over Saturday night and through Sunday morning so I figured that NOT being a pro, I opted out of having to navigate water-logged roads with 72 other riders. And to top it off, my lovely sister decides to make Father's Day brunch reservations for Sunday on Friday afternoon. Naturally, reservations were limited so 9am was the only slot available.

So I took advantage of the few hours of rain-free weather Saturday and decided to do a race-like effort to make up for my Housatonic Hills bagging. I did a modified version of my Winsted 6 "Gaps" ride. It was the first crack at it this year and I wanted to see if I'm defying the aging process like Hill Junkie continues to do. I've been experimenting with a lower cadence climbing style and it seems to be working. I always thought staying aerobic was the name of the climbing game but I seem to be climbing faster pushing bigger gears at ~10 or so less rpms. One climb in particular which is actually part of the Tokenoke Road Race, I would usually climb in my 34x22 seated at about 90-95 rpms. I'm now climbing it in my 34x17 at about 80 rpms. This equates to nearly a 2mph increase. I'm probably in the neighborhood of 5lbs heavier than last year so I guess my power at threshold has improved significantly. Not sure why I'm 5lbs heavier. It must be the ice cream that sometimes find its way in front of me. Now if I can somehow maintain the new-found power and dump the 5lbs I'd be climbing even better. Here's my Saturday ride:











Actual total vert was 5800' over 49 miles. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my average speed was 1 mph faster than my best last year. It doesn't seem like alot but if you look at it in terms of totals, by the time I finished, last year's version of myself would have still been over 2.5 miles away. Uploading to Motionbased gives 7000'. I've recently learned that Motionbased greatly overestimates vertical so I had to go back into my training log and redo my vert totals to match the readings in my Garmin Training Center. Well after a couple hours my modified vert total for the year is 315K. I'm thinking that 500K is doable though Mother Nature hasn't been very cooperative of late.

Big weekend coming up. Friday I'm going up to VT early and I'm hoping Em and I can do a couple hours at the heralded Kingdom Trails. Saturday is Okemo and Sunday is Putney MTB race. It'll be a MTB debut for both Em and I and I'm hoping Em has a positive experience. She should do fine. I'm obviously not tapering or anything for the weekend as I seem to do better when I ride more often. I took 2 days off before last night's Cycleworx group ride and it took nearly 30 miles to find my legs.