Warm October Rains

Well, here it is October and I'm still riding strong. I've recently had a BIG upsurge in ability, and when I ride the trainer (fluid) which is fairly quiet, I'm spinning in the highest gear (hardest) 48x11 for almost a minute until I have to gear down to 48x13, which I can ride for 2 minutes or more, then drop down to 48x16 which I ride for 10 minutes with a 20 second break. Top speed up until now was about 18mph on the trainer. Of course that's much easier than a road ride, but it is comparable - in other words you can keep in shape if you ride diligently.

However for some reason I was suddenly able to ride much stronger starting on 9/16/06, breaking the 30 minute barrier for 10 miles on the trainer.

Even more astonishing is that I continued to ride strong every day for more than two weeks breaking my previous record each day. My final top speed was 36.7 mph (48x11 gear X 100rpm), and my final top average speed was 22mph! This is a big improvement over 18.5 and it's hard to understand how I managed to improve by 3.5mph, let alone riding at this level for 14 days in a row.

AFTERMATH
On the 15th day of this extraordinary power, I decided to get back out on the road and see if I could translate this speed to a road ride.

So I rode for 15 minutes at high power and pumped the quads to the max and then went out to ride the road, still sweating like crazy. My road times are usually in the 15mph avg speed range. Incredibly, after hammering my body for 14 days and being pumped to the max pre-ride, I got 14.7mph avg speed.

I'm hoping as I recover from this hard riding that my road riding time will go up and up, but for now I'm just trying to ride some recovery rides.

The week following all this, I've been riding easy, and the quads are still sore, but over all I'm pretty happy.