"Nice Day For A Run"

Actually more than nice.  It was a great day for a run!  Ten degrees and sunshine!  Perfect!  

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for a bike ride.  And unfortunately I had to do both, with the bike being by far the larger portion.  Sure the sun is wonderful, but 10 degrees just don't cut it, especially when accompanied by a brisk shifting wind.  

I never could get comfortable.  My feet were cold the whole time, and because of my bulky mitts, and the gusty wind, I could never relax in the aero bars.  I did have the wisdom to stay close to home, otherwise I would have been totally screwed by the wind, which shifted almost 180 degrees over the course of my ride.

Some how I willed my way through my 90 kms, and then suffered through the 5K run afterwards.  I was actually happy with my power output, as it was close to what I did over 60K last week, but my speed was quite slow.  I'm gonna try to attribute that to the cold and the wind, but I think there's another reality creeping into my riding.  Age!!  I have always considered 30 k/hr the threshold at which I could do my long rides, but more and more often that ain't happening.  Today I averaged 27.2!

But it is what it is, and I ain't gonna fret over it. After all, for me as for all mortal men, there will eventually come that "last" ride.  I'm still a long ways away from that I think, so I will continue to enjoy the fact that I can still balance on two wheels.  

And I truly, truly love my bike.  It' just such a wonderful piece of engineering, both the mechanical, and the electronic aspects of it.  The cold didn't bother it at all!

And as to my 5K run, I actually quit at 4 kms, but after a very short walk guilt took over, and I finished it up.  I also made sure I did not include the walk portion in my distance.  

Now I'm trying to figure out how to adapt my nutrition intake when I do a longer workout.  I consumed about 800 calories on my bike.  and my technology tells me that I burned about 1250. With some input from Roo I have decided that I should be able to add close to half of that back, and still be a bit negative.  Another way to look at it is that without exercise I should be getting about 1800 calories, and so adding the workout amount gets me to 3000, or about 500 more than a normal day.  I'm gonna try that approach.

And your smile of the day comes from my actions last night after my "Hungry" post.  Roo had gone to bed and I was about to follow her when I discovered the box of timbits she had left on the counter.  I thought I would have just one.  Or maybe 2 with a small glass of  milk?... and then a few more, and a few more, with some more milk.....and I ate them all!  Then I discovered the cream puffs in the kitchen freezer and ate about 10 of those, with another glass of milk!  lmao 

The beautiful thing is that I didn't feel bad about it at all.  I really believe I was hungry.  On top of that I know damn well that over compensating the next day is totally counter productive, and so I still had a nice breakfast this morning.

And that's all she wrote for today.  I hope that next weekend brings a wee bit more warmth.  It's hard to get motivated to ride in the cold, and there's just no way that I'm doing any more long ones in the basement.  Game on!

ride 90 kms, run 5 kms

"Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside."---Valentino Rossi

Love

Peter