This week has been fantastic since the race on Sunday, once again displaying the unpredictability of this sport - a bad race followed by a good week just sounds silly.
Monday, went exploring in the forest... worked for 1.5 hours on wheelies and technical garbage. That was fun.
Tuesday, jumped on the rollers for some hard intervals, then off to the weight room.
Wednesday, HARD day! Went to training with Club Granichen, as usual, at 2h00 for 2.5 hours of technical training. MUD MUD MUD, and rain. Had a fantastic day on the bike, but as I should have noticed on my training schedule, it was not over... again I had a day of hill sprints with Beat. Can't go into many details - some of my competition reads this page - but I worked on a new technique for climbing that improved my speed two-fold. It was me against the locomotive again, and this time I won. 8 sets of STEEP climbing intervals, each 10 minutes... in the pouring rain. Yay for rain, we gotta love it.
Today, I felt the pain when I woke up... but that didn't stop me from checking out the training schedule right away for what I expected would be a nice recovery day... 180 minutes? Tempo? What? WHAT? Oh man, elite training.. I forgot. So, after school and lunch, it was off my butt and into the saddle. Headed out South again, towards Luzern, and about 15 km out, I was about to turn around. Everything hurt, and I was dealing with a killer headwind. I stopped outside of Menzingen to decide about my disappointing return - I was at the point of no return, if I continued, I would be going long. Within a couple minutes of thought, however, I realized that I was just being stupid and that for any other elite, turning back would be out of the question. I dug deep and found a gear. This newfound motivation drove me through an 80 km ride - in three hours, in the wind. The loop is quite impressive on the map - I took quite a chunk out of Switzerland today. Rode down to Luzern (about 5 km outside) and rode back along the Baldeggersee and the Hallwilersee. Average HR 140, average speed 17 mph. Check it out on Google Maps.
http://maps.google.ch/maps?hl=en&q=granichen&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=ch&ei=3snLSbvvNISLsAaZ9u2_CA&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=image
To figure it out, start at Granichen, and go south on Road 23 to Essen, then back North on Road 26 to Mosen, left and over the Schwarzenbach (steep climb!), down into Menziken, and back North to Granichen.
I feel Great!
1 comment:
hey kevin, its israeli H.
i think i do remember you... we slept in the same rv park, didn't we? you were there with your team mates, right?
anyway, i'm happy to see your'e doing well, i mean, extremely well, riding in europe with the swiss national team!!
as you can see, i'm still riding, mostly long and extreme races... and mostly singlespeed. i will keep following your adventures. keep following mine... maybe we'll meet some sunny day.
H
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