Training 2008-W17

Spring weather was in full force this week; that usually implies only one or two more sloppy snowfalls until (queue orchestra) sum-mer-tiiiiiime.

I rescued my bike from the basement, give it a quick checkup (probably too quick, but nothing has fallen off since) and commuted to school on Tuesday. The route is mostly westward, so I constructed a route parallel to Mayfield road, one E-W 5-lane behemoth, on the way there, and another parallel to Cedar road, a second major artery, on the way back. Both worked well; the first featured sanguine crossings of most of the major N-S streets and little cross-traffic at the stop signs in-between, but spotty asphalt conditions through the northern expanse of Cleveland Heights. The latter was a friendlier bike route overall, but required more in-traffic negotiation and a mile or so at the end with little choice but to merge and suffer.

I repeated the exercise (ding!) Thursday with two additional routes. All said, about 40 miles of bicycling at 16-17 mph overall, traffic stops included. Best of all, it's free exercise, time-wise: within 10% of my typical commute time by car. I'm looking forward to leaving early one morning and seeing how quickly I can ride it in less traffic.

Somewhere in-between I hit North Chagrin [sat] for some mixed trail/road running. I've found that running in the afternoon is difficult, probably because I'm not taking care of nutrition during the day. Overall: some hills to the tune of +-1000', a pleasantly increased rate of vitamin D3 synthesis, and 9.1 miles at 9:30/mile.

Friday I rested in preparation for Saturday. Saturday AM we started in the Heights for a three-part run: 7.5 miles @ 8:20/mile, followed by a short water break then 3.1 miles @ 8:05/mile, then a bathroom break and 10.1 miles @ 8:53/mile. That's a total of 20+ in about 3 hours, nicely on track for an equivalently painful race in a few weeks.