Hill Training

What a great weekend!

Friday started off with the usual thrills -- our "Fun Friday" morning swim practice. I can't imagine that any swim team, anywhere, gets more enjoyment out of their workouts than we do on Fridays. If you don't already swim with us on Friday, well...you should.

I also had a most excellent day from a social standpoint, and I also got quite a bit of work done. I did have one little glitch at the office that required brief attention, but it turned out to be nothing of concern. By evening, we had confirmed our bike riding plans for Saturday, and I got a good night's sleep.

I needed it. I got my butt kicked on Saturday morning.

Our "Foothills Masters Cycling Team" selected the dreaded Lookout Mountain as our VTP for the day. (For you non-cyclists, VTP stands for "Venue of Torture and Pain".) Since we are training to go over the Continental Divide, I suppose it makes perfect sense to ride straight up an insanely steep road...but that doesn't mean I didn't question my own sanity during every single agonizing turn of the pedals.

I do love the views, though. There are spectacular vista around every hairpin turn, and frequent visual reminders of just how far you've climbed. It's almost as if you're looking straight down on the city, feeling somehow superior to the tiny insignificant citizens driving around down in the valley.

Christine and Laurel were kind enough to wait for me. They claimed that they were working hard, but somehow managed to continue a cheerful and relaxed conversation as I was gasping for every precious molecule of oxygen I could grab. There's no way I could utter a single word, much less discuss summer schedules and camping trips.

Those two are animals.

Here's an elevation plot of the loop we did. It's from a very cool website called Map My Ride. (There's also a "Map My Run" site.)



I especially love the automatic rating of "Category" climbs (shaded in gray). The Cat 4 segment is going up Rooney Road, and the Cat 2 is Lookout Mountain itself. The site's definitions of the categories crack me up: Cat 1 is "really hard", Cat 2 is "not quite as hard as Cat 1, but still pretty hard", and so on. Not exactly Spock-like precision here. (I'm sure they're defined in more detail somewhere, but I'm not going to look it up right now.) Anyway, anything steeper than Lookout Mountain is probably outside my comfort zone right now.

But if I keep riding with this group, I'll definitely get better at climbing. As for the downhills, well, I do OK on those. There were many spots where my teammates were pedaling downhill while I was holding the same speed by coasting. I guess I'm the beneficiary of something called "gravity-friendly morphology". I thought that was a pretty cool advantage until I found out that it just means "Dude, you're fat!"

Oh well. I've gotten used to being called "aesthetically divergent" (ugly) and "socially ingenuous" (nerdy)...so I should be able to deal with the fact that my personal gravitation field is stronger than any possessed by the svelte young athletes with whom I ride. On the uphills, it's all about Power-to-Weight Ratio -- but going down, it's about pizza and ice cream. At least I have an advantage somewhere.

We'll probably do Highgrade next weekend, and will check out whether any of that route was hit by the fire. Let me know if you'd like to join us. In the meantime, enjoy our little April snowstorm, and have a great day!