Go Crit Racer Go

I am wrecked right now, but I'll do my best to pull it together enough to write a decent post. I've been meaning to blog for the past two weeks, but I kept forgetting. Blame the holidays.

Right now, I'm blaming the holidays for a lot...mainly how I'm feeling right now. As has already been said...I am wrecked right now.

Last week was officially week one of Ironman training. I know, I know. You thought it started a few weeks ago. It did...kind of. Those were my prep weeks, but last week was my first official week of base training. Base 1 Week 1. And it was a bust. I tweaked my knee a few weeks ago (the left one, as always) and re-aggravated it last week to the point I was hobbling around for a day and couldn't get my workouts in. That was a day I was supposed to put in some big volume so I fell way behind right there. Then came x-mas, and I got lazy and decided I'd rather eat candy than workout. There's a price to pay for that, and I paid it tonight.

Today was supposed to be a rest day, but since I didn't get much accomplished last week I decided to ride tonight. I did my Race Day workout. It's a crit race, and it's absolutely brutal.

For those who don't know what a crit race is, it's a circuit type race. It's on a short course, maybe one or two miles long, and you do multiple laps. It's typically timed - maybe 40 minutes - so you know how long you'll have to suffer.

The video is pretty cool, and as far as indoor riding goes I recommend this one. It's kind of fun and time goes pretty quickly. It is, however, brutal. And my lazy, candy-eatin' ways punished me tonight. I suffered through this, but never felt good. I hit my peak power in the first minute and that upset my stomach so I had 40 minutes of regretting eating junk food for the past few weeks. Then I started to fade so I added fatigue to my stomach problems. I finished, but it wasn't without a price.

Here are a few screen shots of the video:

This is about 25 minutes into the workout, and you have to catch the breakaway by holding an intensity of 10 for more than a minute. It's tough because you're pretty spent by this point.

Here is my power data from the ride. Yellow is power. Red is heart rate. You can see how my power trends downward throughout the workout. I really struggled to hit the same numbers I was hitting early in the workout. A "9" in the last ten minutes wasn't the same as a "9" in the first ten minutes.

I need to get my motivation back and get into shape. The holidays are tough for working out, but they're almost over and then I can focus on getting back into ironman shape.

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Speaking of the holidays, even though they weren't good for training, they were good overall. Sometimes you gotta let the training slide a bit and enjoy life...or so they tell me.

I don't typically decorate for the holidays, but I figured why not go all out this year. By all out, I mean a two foot tree and nothing else.

Overall, it was a great x-mas. Pretty mellow, but that's the way I like it. I hung out with the fam, ran 5 miles in a 33 degree rain on Christmas Eve (which was actually really fun), did some yoga, watched a few movies and spent the majority of the weekend with Courtney.