Friday, May 2, 2008

Legs of Poo

Do you have strong, powerful legs? Are you tired of walking up stairs without any assistance from the rail?

Do you hate standing for long periods and not feeling fatigued?

Then you need my new workout program called Legs of Poo.

It's simple. Take your singlespeed rear wheel (you do have a singlespeed don't you??) and turn it around to the fixed gear side. Now go ride in the hills for a couple of hours.

It's that simple. Two short hours and you can have gimpy noodles of poo filled legs.


After my first ride on my SSRBFG (that's Singlespeed Road Bike Fixed Gear) on Monday and subsequent much longer ride with hills on Tuesday, I awoke Wednesday to quivering, shaking, wet noodles with feet on the ends that I was expected to walk on. I also was scheduled to ride my mountain bike Wednesday and again on the road yesterday. My legs hurt amazingly bad but I still rode Wednesday at Warriors Path where the hills are short and punchy (like my brother-in-law) but I took it as easy as I could.
Yesterday morning, I had to hold the rail going down the damn stairs at my house. I could not believe how much one ride on the fixie hurt me. I felt like I had lifted weights or something. So I did the only thing I could do.

I loaded up the geared bike for the road ride.

The Thursday ride @ Buck's Pizza has become one of the biggest rides in our area in just its second year. There was about 50 people there last night and about that many the week before. I like that ride because it ends with the 2 mile climb of Buffalo Mtn (with plenty of small hills before that) and alot of my friends are always there. I do most of my training alone so it's nice to ride in a group some.
Last night I made the decision to NOT chase anybody under any circumstances. I had my buddy and uber-training partner David Hayter to keep me honest which he did - for awhile. Once we got into the hills and heading towards Buffalo, David set off to catch a group ahead of us. I started to go to but sat up until they were far enough ahead where it didn't matter anymore.
I started up the climb proper and just spun my happy ass along to the top while I chatted with Jonell (she just ran a marathon last Saturday and was on her third ride of the week that I know of - and people call me insane). All was good.

Until the descent.

We started the descent and I heard someone talking about the sprint line at the bottom. Dammit why did I have to hear that. At first I didn't react but then I got into a nice tuck and bridged up to David (I'll keep you honest - sure you will buddy) and a couple of strong riders from TCRC - Perry and Kingsley. Still not totally committed to the sprint, I just sat in to observe but as the line drew near and the speed increased, I got that itchy feeling that could only mean I was about to do something stupid. I was just off the right of David and he started to fade. I saw Perry and Kingsley look over their left shoulders and I went hard. I buried myself until I spun out my 53X12 and as I went across the line, I saw 40mph on my computer and I had 20 feet on everyone else. Granted the sprint is on a slight downhill so those speeds are fairly easy but it still felt good.

For a minute then I remembered why I was riding supposedly easy.

It hurt.

I think I'll take today off completely. I am tired.

1 comment:

MCF said...

That's an awesome start of a blog! I love the workout description!