Endurance Nutrition

Been so busy this week. My bike light hasn't come back from Blackburn yet so no hill ride again this week. I'll make up for it on Sunday with another (futile) assault on "Big Woodley" this Sunday.

So last Saturday's ride was okay. The aforementioned "Big Woodley" is the second hill heading north on Woodley Ave., just past Rinaldi. I tried going up it but I didn't get very far. I'll try and get a little farther each week. When I reach the top of that, I'll know it's time to try an assault on the hill on Lopez Canyon. Anyway, after failing that I went hard up Balboa and did quite well. Made me tired for the rest of the day, though.

Later on Saturday I was reading and a bit about fueling up more often on long rides caught my eye. On Sunday I decided to down a gel every 45 minutes instead of every hour and even have one just before the ride, like I have seen recommended for race day. I was feeling pretty tired from the day before but ended up with my second fastest time on that route--and that's with doing one-legged drills. What's up with that? I will be keeping a closer eye on this fueling up stuff in the future. What occurred to me was that I have been thinking of fueling up in terms of my usual "endurance" workouts, which were usually runs of 30-60 minutes. When you do that you can get away with eating nothing during the workout. However, as Alberto Contador's bonk during Paris-Nice demonstrated, riding for two, three, or more hours is not the same thing and I need to put fuel in the tank.

Regarding the one-legged drills, near as I can tell they're both working equally. That was a disappointment...either that or I did them wrong.

Last week's swimming workouts were wonderful. This week I felt a bit more tired but still had decent workouts. I only have two swims a week but I really work myself. I am so tired today. On the bright side, I think my shoulders are getting bigger or maybe it's just fat loss. I am doing 500s as my long swim. I have this mental problem where I don't like distance swimming so even though I could go farther, I am working on the mental side of things by doing these long swims until I can get over my dread. I had actually forgotten about feeling that way in high school. I'm getting better, though. Once I'm done with the 500s I'll probably start breaking the distance into sets of 200 with short rests between just to break up the monotony.