After a day off the bike yesterday, I felt good this morning so I set out to do a long ride to pad my weekly training hours. I want this to be a high volume week and with a long ride today and state championships over the weekend, I should be able to accomplish that. I made a couple bottles and packed some food and headed west towards Middleton. I dressed cool, thinking that it was going to be hot today, so for the first hour I was kind of chilly, but it felt nice. I kept the pressure on the pedals and kept the wattage just below a tempo pace. My legs felt good so by the time I reached Middleton I decided to do the full Payette Loop.
I continued west to Wilder and realized I must have had a tailwind since I was constantly doing 23-24 MPH without much effort. I did my usual bathroom and water stop in Wilder then headed north on Hwy 95 to Payette. This was about the only stretch I had a headwind, and it wasn’t too strong. I looked at the forecast before I left, and it said the winds should shift to a northwest flow by the afternoon, which would be perfect as it’s mostly a southeast ride from Payette back home to Eagle.
I stopped at the usual Payette Chevron, just in time for the high school across the street to get out for lunch. So the convenience store was overrun with teenagers! I went in and filled my bottles and while doing so, I was bitten by a mosquito inside the store! I guess with all the traffic, the doors were pretty much open the whole time, letting the critters in. Oh well, hopefully, it didn’t carry the West Nile virus which has become a prevalent problem around here. On a side-note: Tuesday night they did their first wave of mosquito abatement. As we were going to sleep we could hear the crop dusters buzzing by, just 300 feet above our house.
Back to the ride…after refueling, I rode near tempo all the way to Emmett where I made my last stop. Up until this point, the skies were overcast so it kept the temperature perfect for riding. It wasn’t until I hit Old Freezeout that I actually felt hot. But coming down Hwy 16 I had a kicking tailwind and I pushed it all the way to Beacon. It was fun and my legs were still feeling good, as long as I kept it sub-threshold. I could tell this would be a fast ride due to the perfect wind conditions so I kept the pace high all the way home. When I finally got home I managed a time of 5:07 for 110 miles (~21.5 MPH average). I think the wind gods were smiling on me today! I also achieved an even 300 TSS fro the ride.
My average power was decent at 225 watts, which is one of the highest I’ve recorded for a ride over 5 hours. After downloading my ride, I also realized that I rode the second half of the ride harder (based on wattage) than the first half. So I confirmed that my long-term power is doing very well, probably from all the base miles I did early in the year. I’ll be using the state championships races this weekend as training, so I’m not worried that I only have 2-days to recover from today’s ride. My big goal is the Parker Mainstreet Omnium in mid-September, so everything I do until then is just training for it.
After showering and eating a ton of food I went to a Yoga class. Hammering in one position for five hours straight made my body really tight, so I figured I needed some forced stretching to loosen things up. I usually stretch after my rides, but there’s nothing like an hour-long Yoga class to improve your flexibility and balance.