Neat trick, eh?

Lately, I've been focusing more on eating B.D.A. (before, during, and after training). It should be obvious that if you're going to eat a restricted number of calories that it would be best if they were consumed around exercise time. What doesn't work is pigging out in the morning and early afternoon, then getting hungry before riding followed by not eating while riding and not eating after the ride.

Yesterday, I thought about how it'd be nice if lunch was ready to eat just minutes after finishing my ride. Yesterday's lunch would have taken about 25 min to cook, pushing the limits of the 30 min post-workout refueling window. I thought it would've been great if my convection oven could start cooking at a designated time. It was a long shot but I checked the manual and discovered that this oven that I've had for several years did indeed have an auto start feature. So after a particularly hard ride (4x20 at 300W), I didn't have to prepare a recovery drink or eat junk food (my other recovery food).

Fool me once...

A bit of an RR backlog has developed. Not due to a high body count but my laziness.

This post is about my 2nd day riding outside this season, which was on a Saturday back in February. It was when my TSB was like -45 and I felt like utter crap. Being a warm weekend day in February there were a lot of riders out.

In the middle of the ride, I returned from a leg down a side road and when emerging onto the main road, a guy on a TT bike went by at a pace a little higher than what I felt like doing. He passed two riders riding slowly together and then I passed them. I was just riding low tempo and everyone seemed to be minding their own business. Then I noticed a rider a few hundred yards behind me and closing. I ramped it up to L4 briefly and started pulling away. The chaser appeared to give up and slow down while looking around behind him. He must've been one of the duo earlier and had decided to chase riders not going all the fast--testing his early season legs in a fairly unambitious manner. Yet he was sent back to his companion in shame. Oh, the shame.

As I approached the back of RR KOM (pictured below), I passed two older clydesdales riding really slowly. I was just chugging along doing low tempo and was content to shift to a really low gear, keep power steady, and just spin up the hill.



The two old dudes didn't register as threats because they were riding together, riding slowly, didn't accelerate when I passed, and let a big gap develop. All indications were that neither of them would try to chase me up the climb.

It seems that each season an RR or QRR gets the better of me. It's always early in the season when I don't have the proper RR hunting mindset and never because they have superior fitness. It's always the result of my letting my guard down and subterfuge on their part.

My mistake was assuming they were non-combatants and not checking my six every few seconds when passing someone on the approach to the hill. As I leisurely summited, one of the fatsos squirted past me on the right, in my blind[er] spot. That was a true WTF moment for me since I thought he was still a few hundred yards behind me. Now some fat old dude thinks he's hot shit when his "victory" spoke nothing of his fitness but only of his subterfuge. Always subterfuge. In Latin, that would be a good motto for RRs.

That incident really emphasized one of the most annoying things about RRs--not that they want to race all the time but that they are shameless cheats. Why not just jump in front of the peloton at the TdF and cross the finish line just ahead of them? Congratulations, you just won a stage at the Tour de France.

In the aftermath, my new protocol was to assume any rider that I pass while heading towards the hill is a threat and to keep an eye on them no matter how non-threatening they seemed.

name: SNOD1 (Sneaky Old Dude #1)
fitness rating: 5/10
aggressiveness: 5/10
pusillanimity: 10/10
arrogance: 7/10
special ability: some kind of cloaking device

Stay tuned for part two...

Training

Yesterday, I did something a bit different--4x20 at 295W rather than 3x20 at 305-310W. It hurt a lot less but that may have been due to better eating habits or, though there isn't any sound evidence, simply being more rested.



Perceived exertion was reasonable. It was somewhat annoying but I didn't really feel any pain. About 12 minutes into #3, the VT load unit suddenly switched off. The power cord had apparently been vibrating itself loose over time and finally lost its connection. The flywheel had come to a complete stop and it took quite a lot of effort to get it going while the load unit was still braking. It put a nice "burn" in my legs which went away after a few minutes of extra high cadence pedaling.

I will probably switch both of my weekly L4 workouts from 3x20s to 4x20s.