L.S.L.D.

Well it’s been a very busy week this week. Tuesday was a fast paced single speed 20 mile MTB ride, then coming home to spend some time with Monkey. Wednesday morning we were up at 3:30am (after going to bed at midnight) to get Monkey to the airport I was home from the airport by 5am and decided hey it’s sub freezing temps and 5am and I’ve had 3 hours of sleep I think I’m going for a road ride. Wednesday turned out to be a long, long day in which I actually did 2 road rides and a MTB ride logging 102 miles on the road and 20 miles on the MTB. Thursday was a much needed day of rest both mentally and physically. Friday I got off work and decided to ride the new LSLD loop (the Wednesday road ride) as a single ride. It was nice to ride it a second time since I knew where I was going, instead of having to read a cue sheet every 5 minutes. Today (Saturday) I went out to a friend’s house to meet up with Glenn Dog aka GlennDa, the Filthy Wilson and D-Rock. I’ve been trying to get this crew together for several weeks now to log some miles and B.S. sessions with my friends. Today was that day only I didn’t organize the ride. D-Rock and I rolled our single speeds while The Filthy and GlennDa went geared. Going into this ride my legs felt pretty wiped out from the 242 miles that I’ve put on them this week but, for some reason about 15 minutes into the ride they seemed to come alive again for a while at least. I managed to do a pretty good job of holding D-Rocks wheel and I’m not that familiar with those trails like D-Rock and GlennDa are. All I could see were deep leaves everywhere and the occasional creek crossing. Near the end of the ride my fatigued legs caused me to make the first endo of the New Year. Hopefully that will be the last as well but, that’s wishful thinking. I was hoping today’s ride would be a snow ride however in ad odd twist of fate while I was out west of town (where it normally snows) it was snowing in town. I came home to a white yard. If the snow holds I might try to get a nice snow ride in later Sunday Morning while the ground is still frozen.

So in my quest to get a good training routine established in the realm of a somewhat brutal LSD road ride I polled the local roadies on what the hardest local climbs were and compiled them all into a century ride that I call the Long Slow Leg Death (LSLD) ride. I also adopted the rule of not using the little ring up front on the road bike during the ride. Big ring only, that still allows 10 gears. Although I managed to average 16.3 MPH over the 100 + miles of the LSLD ride the ride is not as brutal as what I expected. It’s attainable and I guess I was hoping for something that was initially un-attainable. I would like to start riding the LSLD once a week but, my schedule will only allow me to maybe do it twice a month. I guess riding it more often will be the un-attainable aspect that I get.

I’ve been doing some experimentation with my sleep pattern after reading some psych books. To make a long story short the author believes that a 90 minute sleep session or multiple 90 min. sessions is the best way to feel rested. In 90 minutes your mind goes from drifting off into entering REM, into REM, out of REM and mildly waking. Then the process starts over again. This suggests that 7 and a half hours of sleep would be more ideal than 8 hours or 7 hours as you don’t want to be in the REM state when you awaken. So all of this sounds odd right? Well this week I’ve tried running on 3 hours, 6 hours and 7:30 of sleep and I have to say that I’ve felt very mentally alert when I awaken in the mornings verses feeing dead to the world and feeling the need for massive quantities of Redbull before work. Give it a try sometime.

Here are some pics taken throughout the week.

Is train humping really that common? I would'nt know where to start humping a train. Should I buy it a drink first?




You bet I did. My way or the highway. the highway to hell.




Peace,
Metro