Training Summary - Week 3

This week was an interesting training week. The prior weekend I felt invincible on the bike, climbing with ease. But this week started off difficult. The first workout was road bike climbing  intervals, and I just couldn't get my heart rate up. The second workout was an easy mountain bike ride, and again I couldn't find the power or any skill for that matter. I was putting my foot down everywhere. If this continued, I would start to worry, but I chose to assume that this meant I was training good and hard.

Things turned around on Thursday when I did mountain bike intervals up the Horsetooth tower road. I did 4500-5000 feet of climbing before work. See the nice pictures below.

Pre-sunrise at the marina

Longs peak from the top of Tower Road

Friday I had a short 1 hour recovery road ride planned. I procrastinated throughout the day, and ended up missing the ride in exchange for watching a movie with Mickey. It was worth it.

The weekend training plan consisted of the first overnight to work out gear selection and to start getting accustomed to the extra weight. The plan was for 4 hour Saturday, camp out, and 4 hours on Sunday. Lory State park has six back country camp sites, so I planned to ride Horsetooth Mountain Park, and then head over to Lory and meet up with Mickey and Sam who would backpack in from Lory.

Saturday morning I started getting a stomach ache, which is not something that I'm used to. I started riding about 2:00 pm, and rode every hard ride I could think of including Stout, Herrington, Wathen, West Ridge, Spring Creek, The service road, Mill Creek and Howard. Despite the extra fifteen pounds of gear on the bike, the riding went well. Unfortunately by the time I reached the camp at around 7:00 pm, my stomach was killing me.

It was fairly cold and very windy at this point. This combined with the fact that Mickey and Sam had seen a bear hiking in resulted in both of them being hunkered down in the tent. After resting a bit, we cooked dinner and went to bed. The girls in the tent, and me in my new bivi sack.

By midnight my stomach hurt so bad that I was writhing in pain in my sleeping bag. I thought that I had some strong narcotic pain medicine in my first aid kit to handle situations like this, but when I got up to look they weren't there. I took an aleve with not much hope that it would help, but within an hour I was feeling a lot better and was able to sleep, despite the 30 mile an hour winds.

I felt well enough to ride for 4 hours on Sunday, but didn't feel as strong. I still don't know what caused the issue, and I'm still not feeling that great.

In summary, the week went well. My mileage was low, but I did mostly mountain biking and I did a lot of climbing. The totals for the week show 17643 feet of climbing this, but if I turn on elevation correction in GarminConnect, the total is almost 21000 feet. 

Here are the totals.