L.A. to Boston - May 10 to June 28 - 3415 Miles

Friday, April 11, 2008

April 11th - Still Training Indoors

Four weeks from today I fly to L.A for the start of the XC Tour. I plan to ship my bike two weeks from today to allow it plenty of time to arrive in time to be assembled by the tour staff. Other than around town errands, I have only been on one outdoor training ride and that was last weekend. The winter snow had just finished melting off our only bike trail. I still had to go around one shady section that still had snow drifted on it.

We are still having winter with rain and snow plus tornado warnings. The temperatures are in the 30s/40s often with very strong prairie winds. Looks like I will be training indoors again most of this weekend. That will leave one weekend before I ship my bike. Other than the one long ride a week ago, I have done all my bike training indoors on a spinner using a heart-rate-monitor and Sally Edward's Heart Zone Threshold training program. My outdoor 80 mile ride last weekend felt good so I believe the Heart Zones training has worked well. I have also done all of the other long rides suggested by CrossRoads including the two centuries although they were all indoors. At first it bothered me a lot doing most of my training indoors, until I talked to a CrossRoads XC rider from last year. He was from Canada and had done all but his very last ride indoors and got along fine on the XC. He did run outdoors, though, and I have also power-walked and run outdoors all winter (we have two dogs that get walked twice a day no matter what the weather is) - so now I don't feel so badly about the indoor training. It did take some determination to get in the indoor "groove". Good videos and podcasts make indoor training somewhat bearable.

Guess that's all for now.