Biking, Running Fun in the Sun

What a nice weekend!

Adventures in Cycling

Yesterday was just a wonderful ride. My hubby, Cathy, our training partner Malinda, and I met up to throw together 3.5 hours of riding. No real plan, just go here, go there, starting from the veloway.

It was such a beautiful day. The first wonderful thing was that Southwest Parkway felt soooooo much easier than it did this summer. Now, I know part of that is I hadn’t done a 3–5 hour trail run the day before (ha!  Everything feels better when you haven’t done that) but I never had to stand to climb any hill nor did I ever feel like I ran out of gears. Both those things happened last summer. 

Then, we meandered on over towards MoPac and did a loop before heading out Escarpment. I suggested we take Davis back to MoPac but then we opted not to do the on-ramp and wound up heading down Brodie…except it doesn’t go back to MoPac, so we turned around and took Slaughter (!). 

OMG…my first experience with belligerent dipshit motorists. Bike weenie Leah of one month ago would have dissolved into a quivering mass of jelly but not now. Oh, I managed to cross three lanes of traffic to make a left hand turn, among other things. We rode back and finished up with a palate-cleansing loop on the veloway. After that, we had a 30 minutes run which went fine. Good day, good day.

Road vs Trail Runs

Today was nice in that we had a run with a strong mid-section and that felt good. It made me reflect on the difference between the mental focus in trail runinng and road running.

In trail running, you focus so much on the here-and-now of what is under your feet that you almost disengage from the running (does that make sense?). In road running, you must be uber focused on the running itself, the pacing and the effort. On trail, when you focus on the ground, the pacing and the effort just happen, because the trail dictates what you can do. So I am having to relearn the intensity of focus that goes with road running. Because it’s so “easy” (nothing much to concentrate on under my feet), if I don’t watch it, my mind will wander and then my intensity slacks off. So those “strong” 15 minutes today were actually pretty tough.

Very interesting.

Winding Up with a Swim

Afterward, we had a lovely swim. Then, I came home and took an awesome nap (windows open, breeze blowing, cat snuggled up with me). My family has been super wonderful.

I’ve baked a carrot cake and my husband put together a lovely appetizer and we will eat dinner here soon. I am lucky!

Week 11: IM Training Totals

swim     2:40
bike       5:10
run        2:50
——————
total     10:40