2-Epic

Here are my two regular training partners, Wesley and Emma.

They are always up for a ride and usually in a good mood – though never take pulls. The Snow Canyon park restrooms is a trip highlight, for some reason they love that. They get all mad at me if I bypass it.

The toilets through can be stinky though….

The climb up through the park is 4 miles and takes me about 20 minutes on my road bike. With these guys in tow it takes me 40 minutes. We have another pit stop at the top of the hill so the kids can play and run around for a while. The views from the top are pretty cool.

We get up to about 37 mph on the descent, the kids lean forward holding onto the front of the trailer and scream “go faster mommy”. Yesterday Wesley shouted “mommy go as fast as a race car” LOL! I have some sketchy cantilever brakes on my trailer bike so don’t like to get much faster than that. I imagine it must be a fun ride for them as they are sitting real close to the ground with only a layer of canvas between them and the pavement. Maybe they will be lugers when they grow up. Wesley says Santa is going to bring him a skate board which will be as fast as a race car and will go much faster than my bike.

Fergy is back in town and he arrives with a new ride for ’06: check it out!

I’d advise getting out of his way this year :)

Ma nature scuttled plans for the Kokopelli trail recon so it turned out to be a double white rim weekend.  Questionable at best…the weather was rough, the drive from D town to hole-in-the-rock looked like this:

The holy ground (or is that hell?) was warm enough to keep the snow off…but had received lots of rain.  Flash floods left their traces all over the eastern side of the WR and the road was completely different in all tech/sandy spots.  Very slow going compared to last weekends float conditions.  Can you say arctic headwinds?  Could be worse – I could be living in Park City and thinking it will be good for training.

It only takes one stop longer than 5 minutes to drive home the realization that stopping is not a good thing.  If it’s cold enough for water bottles of e-Fuel to freeze (high electrolyte content so it was really cold!), guess what happens to a skinny sweaty biker…

Day 1 was clockwise.  Here’s a different view of Hardscrabble:

This hill is darn steep in this direction!

Day 2 the weather was different – less clouds, less wind, colder.  The puddles remained frozen for the duration, as did my bottles.  Ice & fast riding is *really* fun.  Keeps you on your toes.  This was the last ride of a big training block, and I like to push it towards the end if able.  The last 3 hours of this day were nothing short of magical.  The MP3 was dishing out the goods and the wind was light, even a tailwind for much of it!  Pizza was the primary fuel source today, and let me tell ya, ain’t nothing better for long rides.

Weekend stats:

ride time: 14.5 hours
Pave:       206
Pnorm:     220
kJ:           10,621
miles:        208

The day 2 file is here.

The sunset yesterday was a beauty.  Here’s the parting shot of the WR in ’05.

My SRM has been telling me I’m one of the fastest ladies on a mountain bike recently so I’ve been on a quest to discover where this wackiness is coming from, ’cause it probably isn’t my legs. I’ve waded through the SRM manual a few times which is a weird experience as it is translated from German. I had to learn how to calibrate my SRM and check the accuracy of my Power-Taps. All checked out to be healthy – SO maybe I am that fast. BUT Dave compared his White Rim files with mine and said no things are wacko – SO maybe I’m not that fast.

Hmmm. I put both PM’s on my Scalpel and rode the trainer to get the real answer on whether the SRM is reading high.

Comparing PT and SRM power files side by side was not easy, power was all over the place. The trainer only told me I had to change the SRM sampling from 3 sec to 1 sec to match the PT.

Next step was to actually ride out on the trails. My Scalpel has no V-brake mounts and PT no disc rotor mounts so this meant no rear brakes. That turned out to be fun in a sick kind of way.

I don’t have a solid conclusion yet as power was all over the place but with the help of some folks a lot smarter than myself the SRM looks to average about 11 watts higher than the PT off-road.

Oh, and the desert weather is back to normal again. 65F and sunny when I rode yesterday :-)

~Lynda

The training plan calls for one more epic weekend before moving on to new things.  This may be taunting the weather gods, but I’ll head to the Moab area one last time this year.  On deck is another White Rim loop and the Dewey Bridge to Moab section of the Kokopelli Trail:

Curiak puts on an “unofficial” self-supported race on the full Kokopelli trail in May.  Looks brutal, so of course I’m interested.  This is a scouting mission, the primary task being find out where water is available!  The race hasn’t been completed by a woman yet so guess who has set her sights on the event?  Must be a super slow course with a lot of sand in the lower sections as the course record is just under 15 hours.  Maybe 2 hours of that is filtering water. 

As of last weekend it was clear sailing at 8500′ in the La Sals, but the weather is getting increasingly grumpy…so it could turn out to be 2 WR rides…or less if old man  winter shows up in full force.

This weekend will have CTL rising to the 135 range.  I don’t spend much time at these levels outside of race season, so it’ll be time to dump some of that and trade it in for some good ol’ L5 block work, which will lead to the final build for Old Pueblo.  What is this dribble, you ask?  More details on that in the near future.

 

weather.com reported Fair and Breezy, 45F with 32mph winds, wind chill 37F. 

I’m gonna have to change the weather site on my favorites as I take issue with 32 mph wind being described as “breezy” ’cause it nearly blew me off my frigging bike. 37F with wind chill is stay indoors time for desert dwellers like moi but this winter I have decided to be tough and ride any way – so I did. It felt like a hard ride but the power meter tells a totally different story. Gotta get this cold thing figured out. It is winter right?

Entire ride (141w):

Duration: 2:37:48

Work: 1336 kJ

TSS: 137.7 (intensity factor 0.724)

Norm Power: 174

Distance: 38.514 mi

                     Avg

Power:           141 watts

Heart Rate:    135 bpm

Cadence:       78 rpm

Speed:          14.7 mph

It’s official, I’m addicted to this loop.  Had to burn off some turkey yesterday, so did another trip around the WR.  Rode the Dos today with the new PT setup, the file is uploaded here.  6:51, not too shabby for late November. 

Today Mitch and I are off to do the upper upper Porc rim ride…