A Nice Ride

I managed to get out for a pretty decent bike ride Saturday afternoon. Temperatures were in the low 50's, a tad chilly with the wind whistling by on the downhills, but all in all, it was a great ride! (I know, everyone who lives where there is a "real" winter is laughing about the bit saying low 50's is cold!) It was my first ride on some of the largely deserted roads of the former Fort Ord, literally in our backyard, but the first time since we moved out here last June that I have gotten out to ride them. I am going to try a new trick today, that is posting my route as shown in Google Earth and the workout statistics recorded on my handy Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS unit, so you can see the workout in all its glory! Here goes, first the map:

 

On this ride, I discovered all manner of things out on the lands of the "Fort Ord Public Lands" that I didn't know was there before, such as BIG hills (see below; I think it says I was up around 800 – 900 feet of elevation, which is about twice as high as anything else I have encountered around here to this point). Aside from being pretty smoked by some of the uphill grades I laboriously pedaled up (you can probably tell where those spots were based on the graph, look for when my ticker was pretty much pegged out, ~175 bpm or so), it's quite scenic riding out there, with lots of sky, smallish mountains off in the distance, and of course, the Monterey Bay to frame it all up. And now for the workout statistics:

 

Sadly, this may be the only ride of this type (i.e. a road ride, "slick" – with no gear or equipment as I carry when I ride to school) I am able to do in the foreseeable future. Why? Because tomorrow I resume DLI classes (Boo!), and a week from tomorrow I resume a structured 16-week running program in preparation for the Big Sur Marathon in late April. I have examined briefly the training program I will be undertaking, and quite frankly, it is a bit scary! For example, the long run for the first week of the program is a 13 miler! Right now, a little less than 2 weeks away from performing that workout, I am wondering how on earth I will be able to! And that's not all, it gets better – by the 4^th week of the program, I will run my first 20-mile (!) training run, to be followed 2 weeks later by another one of the same distance at a faster pace, and repeat that 3 more times!!! If this sounds interesting to you and you'd like to see more details, you can see the full program here (PDF): 

http://www.furman.edu/first/Marathon%20Training%20Program.pdf

 I have never been very good at getting very long training runs done, so hopefully this time I will do better, be more consistent in logging the miles, and with any luck at all, stay injury-free! (Injuries are another problem that has plagued me when increasing weekly running mileage too high, such as what is essentially required to successfully complete a marathon. Big Sur will be my 5^th marathon.)

GJS