Eric's Arcana and RiderX

My wife and I have done a few cycling vacations. The ones we’ve done don’t feature particularly long days – maybe 50 miles over the whole day – but they do involve riding for a bunch of days in a row. I’ve noticed that doing something like that helps my fitness; I just feel better overall.

And therefore I decided to conduct an experiment; I would ride 5 days in a row and see what happened. I wanted every ride to be at least 3 hours, but I wasn’t going for century lengths. And I would ride however I felt like that day.

I expected that I’d start out feeling okay and gradually get more tired as the days went by.

Day 1 was a big hills day; I rode a few of the Issaquah Alps. My speed on the first 3 (Squak, Talus, Zoo) was a conservative speed, but after Zoo I took a trip up Pinnacles and decided that I wasn’t up for Belvedeere, much less the trip up The Widowmaker. I crawled up the back side of Summit and headed for home.

Day 2 was supposed to be a ride all the way around Lake Washington, but after doing the south end I opted to take the 520 bridge back across for home. Felt okay but not great.

Day 3 was an evening ride that I lead. I chose the route to be a little hilly but not too hilly. On the ride down to the starting point, that seemed like a really good decision as my legs were hurting, but despite the hurting, they seemed to perform okay when I needed them. I have a 275’ hill on the way home from the ride with a couple of short 13-15% kickers, and those were not fun *at all*.

Day 4 was a ride in the country, specifically a ride out to Fall City. The intent was for it to be moderately hilly. My legs were tired from the night and I wanted to let the day warm up a bit, so I delayed my start until 11 AM. Legs were pretty sore but warmed up quickly. I had planned to ride up Sahalee (0.9 miles, 404’ of up) but that can be a long slog of a climb, so instead, I decided to head up “The Gate” (0.2 miles, 158’). That’s an average of 15%, with a top gradient of perhaps 21%. I didn’t have a lot of pop on it, but I rode up it okay with just a wee bit of paperboying. Worked my way east, the south, rode down Duthie, and then out to Fall City. Where I stopped at the grocer for a Coke Zero. My plan was to take Fall City –> Issaquah back, and take it I did, via the back way. Despite being on the 4th day and 25 miles into the ride, I was able to climb at about 250 watts pretty easy. Hit the top, finished my Coke Zero, did the bonus, and then worked my way to Issaquah and then back home.

Day 5 was the second evening ride for the week. I played with intensity as I spun through Marymoor, and my legs seemed fatigued but okay. The first climb was short but not a lot of fun. And then we hit Sahalee… I started slow, hit the steep spot, and found that my legs felt pretty good, so I rode the rest of ride at a bit more than 300 watts, averaging 280 for the whole climb. That put me close to my PR on the climb, which was a surprise. I did a sprint up a little steep hill on the route and managed somewhere in the mid 900 watts, though my legs *really really really* hurt at the top. I did notice that my aerobic recovery was pretty quick. After playing down the plateau we descended to East Lake Sam and pacelined back and I managed to “win” the fake sprint at the end by pulling out about 30 seconds from the end. My legs felt good, and the climb up to my house was considerably easier than on Tuesday.

Day 6 was designed just to warm up my legs and help them to recover a bit, so a 3.8 mile ride that took less than 20 minutes.

The true test is going to be what my form is like after recovering for a few days, but early indications are that the minicamp did what I was hoping; I felt stronger in places where I hoped to feel stronger and my recovery seemed pretty good. I was mostly able to sleep quite well, and – somewhat surprisingly – my hunger didn’t seem to increase that much.