With two good workouts under my belt, anything hard I did today would just be gravy…in preparation for the gravy I’d be eating later on!? My club hosted the 5th annual Thanksgiving Day ride and since I was in town this year, I was finally able to participate. We met at the Boise Co-op and I brought some canned food for the Idaho Food Bank, as requested. They also held the raffle to raise money for Broken Brian, a fellow club member who crashed hard descending Bogus and was fired due to his injuries.
The ride started out with a leisurely pace towards Bown Crossing where we stopped to split up into groups. We were going to break up into fast, medium, and slow groups. But when we left, all 60 or so of us were together, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to play out. We chatted as we headed out to Gowan Rd but the pace was a bit more up-tempo now that we were out of town. It was yet another windy day so when we made the right on Gowan Rd we hit the wind like a wall! I looked back to make sure everyone made it through the turn OK then I kicked it up. I wanted to do at least one hard effort today and I figured going into the headwind was the place to do it since others could benefit.
Between the wind and the hill, I was pushing about 400 watts for the first three minutes and it hurt! It’s been a while since I’ve done a VO2max-type effort. Between the pain, the wind and the temperature, it reminded me of how I usually feel at the Slammer—the first race of the local spring series. Surprisingly, PA, whose been a member of the team for years but hasn’t raced recently, was riding with us and he started to roll through as we fought our way up the hill! BH was right behind us but he was content to let PA and I do the work until the top of the hill. Once we got to the top, more people started to pull through and we had a small group of us rotating until we hit a red light at Federal Way.
We may have gotten a few more riders at the light, but once we passed the factory outlets, we started rotating again and resumed a good pace. The wind was so harsh that even with a rotating paceline, the 10-20 second pulls into the wind, were hard. We kept rotating as we made a left on Pleasant Valley Rd. We finally called it good when we made the right on Hollilynn. That’s when we fell back into an L2 pace for some social chit-chat back to the Co-op.
After downloading the ride I was happy to see I broke my YTD best for 5-minute power and got to 3.7% of my all-time best! The entire effort from the turn on Gowan Rd to Hollilynn was also good: 275/305 watts (ave/norm) for 27 mins. I was happy with those kinds of numbers, especially after the last two days of riding. Since the rest of the ride was pretty much a social ride, the final ride stats don’t look as impressive: 1hr 46mins at 195/243 watts for a total of 113 TSS. But hey, it was Thanksgiving and it was fun to get out and socialize while making room for the turkey!