Building on recovery and my physical therapy journey. I started the month off on the first day with a rest day recovery ride. Kept my about two hours in zones one and two for the most part. I am leaning toward skipping the Join Cycling training for a while until after our early summer travel and family visits are done.
I managed to get a metric century in on Thursday. Made a few new PR’s because I decided to push a bit, then caught a fast guy and we began riding together trading lead. Pushed me to go faster than my more usual this year. I’m still down on power at points, but long sustained climbs are better. Well, long for around here. And the long for here climbs are all very gentle. Nice for a sustained effort. Pretty fun. It left me quite sore because I didn’t fuel properly, even though I had everything I needed to do it right. So, once home I guzzled a bottle of electrolyte and iced the quad that had cramped after our rest stop. After that the leg felt better. Not great, but better. Friday will be a real rest day. Probably with a walk and maybe some yoga stretching.
I took Friday as a real rest day. Cleaned up the Pinarello and waxed the chain. The Silca setup makes short work of this.
The bike was a mess after two days through a flooded street. My kit from those days are stained forever now.
Ready to ride with the club in the morning.
The club ride was just two of us for the medium distance ride. We had a great time. The route had some hills I’d not ridden in the directions of the route and that got me thinking about my own route options and adding some of these hills. There were nice work, even though I didn’t push much at all. Choosing instead to stand on the pedals at a leisurely pace and gear. We had a little bit of mist along the way to wet our sunglasses, but not enough to cause any wet ground or spray off the tires.
Sunday’s group ride is from JD Flannel doughnuts in San Juan Capistrano. I probably won’t stop for a doughnut because we have a birthday party after my ride and I want to get home early enough to get cleaned up for that.
I got an early enough start to JD Flannel I had time to stop for a glamour shot. No, I didn’t get the bike into top gear or properly position the cranks or valve stems. And yes, that is the static side shot rather than the more usual drive side. The struggle is real.
The ride up and back netted me around 75km for an average just over 25kph. Not bad for piddling around with a few efforts. I decided while riding I’d maybe skip Tuesday through the following Monday riding for some family stuff we have. I ended the week with a pretty good distance total, only about 20 or so kilometers shy of my goal. I’ll get back to my riding after this rest week. I am tempted to skip the Join Cycling coaching, because I would really rather just ride. I keep going back and forth on that though. Time will tell if I can talk myself into or out of the coaching app.
A good group on Sunday, I couldn’t quite fit everyone in one shot.
After more than a week off the bike, I got back in the saddle. I took an extra day off after arriving home from a flight to/from BC to recover from being in airplanes for a day. That activity did nothing to help my back or knees. So, my first ride after a long week off was very light riding on my now usual route with climbing the bump then out to the park and back around the harbor. On the way out, I normally ride around the harbor, but the coast trail was blocked with what turned out to be about two feet of sand thanks to king tides kicking the new sand the city had laid out on the beach. I rode the Coast Highway up to San Juan Capistrano, cut over to the river trail and took that on out east to the park. On the way back they had the beach access service road open with only a little bit of inch or two of sand on it.
When I was traveling I also was skipping my PT, I did not pack any equipment. I’ll be picking my PT habit back up as I make my way back to normal life here by the beach. My legs are pretty sore after a very light ride, telling me sitting around drinking coffee, eating and talking for a week is not exercise. The short swim I took in the backyard pool was of no consequence for exercise beyond my foot and lower leg cramps while in the pool.
For the rest of this week, I’ll ride easy on Thursday then have a group ride that will be easy on Friday, probably skip Saturday and easy ride Sunday.
After my Thursday ride I’d rolled into the garage and stumbled on some clutter and my bike dropped onto its right side. I didn’t notice anything amiss.
The Friday ride was a tough one at points. We had a small group from the start who picked the pace up over to Bill Barker Park. As we got strung out after leaving the park, I picked up my pace and chased down the front two guys who were a hundred meters up the road. That was a short little dig deep that helped get me going. I’d made a few efforts on the way to the park that helped drive the morning chill away. The pace had picked up a good bit down to the back end of the back bay where we turned and crossed to go around the north side to PCH and out to Balboa. The tempo work out the ferry and coffee break got me set for a back bay effort. I like this segment in this direction, headed inland because of that steep kicker that finishes the segment and usually me as well. Today would be no different. Even with a near stop for a county work SUV out in the way, I managed a new personal best. I pushed my heart rate to 176bpm. Quite a bit over my usual normal top. I averaged 220w over the seven and a half minutes. That steep final climb out, I had chosen just one cog too tall and a little too early. I managed to maintain a bit of momentum to pin down my PB. I’m still messing up the tight couple of turns. I need to practice those more to figure out the best line through there. Having a breeze at my back helps and may just be why I like this direction. There was some more hard efforts for me, knowing I was not riding on Saturday and figuring on an easy day on Sunday.
On Saturday I got the bike down to clean it up. Once I had it up on the stand and began to remove the chain, I noticed the pulley cage looking wonky. checking the gears, the chain would over shift into the spokes and grind against the hanger. It looked much worse than I could capture in a photo. I managed to get the wheel out which at first refused, then pull apart the cage and do a little straightening. The cage had twisted and bent, slightly. After reassembly I had to adjust the lower cog stop to eliminate the overshifting, but the top gear wasn’t a problem now. The upper pulley w as better but the lower still didn’t look great. Off to the internet to find parts. Performance had them in stock and as I type are all shipped. About $50US in parts should show up here before the end of the month. I considered a complete replacement and upgrade, but upgrading to Dura Ace is about a $1,000US and straight replacement appeared to be about half that unless I found a sale. $50 looks a lot better, particularly when I also need to be ordering a spare set of tires. I have a little more than 3,700km or 2,300 miles on this set. The rear is beginning to square off.
I got it all back together and took a short ride up to Poche beach and back to check the shifting functions. Both ends worked fine. I never did get around to cleaning the bike.
Sunday I rode from home over to J. D. Flannel Doughnuts in San Juan Capistrano for the meet up. We did our modified and more modified La Pata climb route. I used the climbs as sort of old school interval efforts. A bit of an elevated effort on the way out to Ortega got me warmed up pretty well for the short little jump up to the first traffic circle segment. I got back behind Rob and another strong young rider and had to work hard to chase. I only waged to catch Rob because of the light at the top of the third hill. I wasn’t getting any personal bests, but forcing things. My Heart rate monitor had a dead battery at the start. I’d failed to check the reading prior to leaving, but it would have been to no use since I was also out of spare batteries. When I discovered it I decided to ignore it and just ride. Rob and I pushed on the flat into the wind back from the Cow Camp neighborhoods. I got lucky with the light at the toll road and held back a bit to recover some for the longer climb coming. That I partially stood for and sat and spun. I went full hard up to the top of the last bit to get my arms tingling by the light. Once we all re-grouped and headed up the toll road path climb, I was back behind everyone and began riding by to chase down Rob and push our pace. When I let up just a little, Rob came around and I figured we could nail a couple of personal bests. When we got to Oso we were spent, but once back home, no PB was seen. In fact it was my third best. The wind was a bit more gusty and all over the place so that is the likely factor. That and making a PB with a tailwind makes improving on that with anything other than a tailwind a big ask.
Not big distance for the week, but my power is feeling better. I’m resting on Monday and Join Cycling has me doing an FTP test on Tuesday. I need to sort the HRM battery, clean the bike up and figure out where I’ll do the test. I really don’t want to do it on the trainer. But, that is probably the smart place. The weeks total distance, 280km.
My start to the week was an abbreviated FTP test. I could not complete it. I had a bad nights sleep, and probably should have taken an extra day for a real recovery and real nights sleep. Hind sight. I’ll try this again in a month or so. I couldn’t get comfortable with my HR around 150 bpm on the trainer. I just hung there watching as my cadence slowly dropped from about 95 rpm then down and down. I had no strength to move the pedals and gave in at around 54 rpm. I’ll get it eventually I guess.
The rest of my week went well enough. Friday was a more relaxed fun ride with a small group of four of us, then Sunday a good group did the Aliso Creel loop.
249km for the week. Not huge, but light days. No pain from the IT band. Feeling pretty good. I’ll finish off the month then July begins with some family visiting.
My last ride of the month, I headed out with the intention of riding another metric century. But, only a quarter way in, I was stung by a bee. The stinger can be seen at my left lower lip. I took this photo to guide my careful search to remove it. That worked.
I was about an hour from home, if I rode quickly. So, that is what I did.
By the time I got home, I was swollen up pretty good. Benadryl, ice and sleep helped. The sleep was fitful napping brought on by the Benadryl. The weather was perfect for a ride. My Kask helmet ratchet adjuster came apart when I went to tighten it on my head.
I called Velo Pasadena about the helmet. I’ll take it to them so they can document the problem and get repair parts from Kask.
Totals for the month:
Distance: 954km
Climbing: 5,589m
Time: 41hours
Along The Way 