After another weekend indoors due to weather, it finally stopped raining and was warm enough to get outside. Ted called me and was also itching to get out. So we met at my house and headed out to do the Hamilton Corner loop. We started doing tempo after a brief conversation and warm-up. We rode out on Foothill, Duff then Galloway. The pace and wattage wasn’t that bad, but the perceived effort seemed high to me. It’s not like my weekend workouts were that hard, so I was surprised my legs felt as bad as they did. I told Ted to we could just ride separately and then regroup at Hamilton Corner.
As we made our way north on Old Hwy 30, it all of a sudden got really cold. Not just cold, but damp as well. As I looked off into the distance, I could see some nasty-looking fog in Emmett Valley. Back in Treasure Valley, the clouds were moving in, but at least it was clear. Ted was quite a ways up the road so when I tried yelling to get his attention, he couldn’t hear me. So I had to put in a hard 1-minute effort to catch him. I told him we should just turn around and head back the way we came. It looked like Emmett had their own little inversion going on and I didn’t want to breathe that bad air. Not to mention, get any colder than I already was. Besides, we were almost at the halfway point so the ride would end up being the same duration as if we had continued with the loop.
On the way back we had a stiff headwind. Since I had already gotten in about 1hr and 20mins of tempo on the way out, I was content with just doing L2 on the way home, so I mainly sat on Ted’s wheel. I did take one good 5-minute pull, right at threshold to see how it would feel. And the answer was clear: Awful! From that point, I essentially sat on the rest of the way back. We threw in a 2-telephone-pole sprint at my request, but my hands were so cold that I couldn’t shift…which was a good excuse for why I faded because after one telephone pole my legs couldn’t sprint anymore!
Not only were my hands cold, but the rest of my body was as well. Some dark clouds had moved in so no more of the nice warm sunshine we had when we started. I was really hating life the last hour or so. When I got home and downloaded my ride, it showed that the ride was indeed quite hard. Not record-breaking, but enough to justify the way my legs felt by the end. It was 3 hrs and 17mins with a total of 212 TSS and 229/244 Ave/Norm power.