Friday, May 7, 2010

Easy rider

I took it easy the past couple of weeks. On Monday April 26, I rode 18 miles on the mountain bike and found that it needed a new cassette. The new chain kept on slipping over the older cogs. Since I did not have a mountain cassette I used a SRAM 9 speed road cassette. The biggest cog is a 23, which on a mountain bike looks minuscule.

On Tuesday I rode on rollers for an hour, including a hard 20 minutes. I also recalibrated my power meter and was able to ride 320+ watts for 20 minutes.

On Wednesday I ran 6.5 miles in the hills.

On Thursday I did some coaching on the Bear's loop in preparation for the upcoming Berkeley Hills Road Race. We practiced several skills and overall I had a great time.

Friday I rode 31 miles to the top of Redwood.

All in all it was a pretty average week.

On May 1 we went to Los Altos for Cat's Hill, and then took off after to Monterey for the NorCal mountain bike league race at Fort Ord. Both days I rode around Fort Ord on my Kuota, exploring the Sea Otter Road Race course. On Sunday I rode over to Laguna Seca and watched the cars for a while. There was quite a bit of wind coming off the Pacific and under those conditions riding was pretty hard.

Monday, May 3rd I rode 45 miles through Orinda and Moraga and up Redwood. On Tuesday I rode another 35. Then on Wednesday I flew to Chicago to lead a panel on neurogenesis at the BIO meeting. I spent most of my day traveling but was able to go swimming for 45 minutes in a hotel pool that was as hot as a sauna. Even though the pool was a lap pool designed for workouts, the water temperature made any hard effort impossible to sustain.

On Thursday I swam another 45 in that same pool, which by the way was located on the 30th floor and had a great view of Lake Michigan. I also rode for 15 minutes on a stationary bike. Today, I rode 40 miles to Lafayette and back. This weekend is the Berkeley Hills Road Race in Orinda.


No comments: