More And More Hills

This morning Drew and I got up early to go for a bike ride in the park. I was a little worried that part of the road would be torn up again. It seems that my fears were well founded, because shortly after we entered the park at 90th Street, we were back on the brain-jarring road. Ugh. I really, really hate it. Once we got back onto regular road again, I told Drew that I wasn't going to ride on that again and I'd rather do hill repeats than to have to ride on that horrible road. I guess that might be a sign of how bad the road actually is.

So, we ended up doing hill repeats on the Harlem Hill. Drew had to be home by 7 so he could be into work by 8, so we did 5 climbs up the hill. Nothing too special to report. Drew beat me up the hill every time. I still feel bad when we ride together that I'm holding him back. Today on the hills, I really tried to concentrate on my cadence and making sure that was high enough and I was less concerned with speed. The thing about training for a hilly triathlon is that you need to practice hills. I want to make sure that I'm training the right way with a high cadence so that in the triathlon I just do what feels normal and don't burn out my legs on the hills. Of course Drew was more concerned with his speed a couple times up the hill, which is probably why he beats me (well, and his stronger leg muscles).

The thing about doing hill repeats is that once you are done with those, you have to then go up the smaller hills on the West side, which I'm not really a fan of. I feel a little wimpy downshifting so much, but by that point my legs are just pretty tired!

When we got back to 90th Street and were waiting for the light to turn green, I peeked down at my bike computer and saw that I had gone 11.69 miles in 50:09 (14 MPH pace). Right after that, Drew said, "Did you see that we went almost exactly 12 miles?". I was a little confused about how that had happened because our times were almost identical, I think his was about 10 seconds longer than mine, but our mileage was about 0.30 off. I did use gmap pedometer when I got home, and that says that the route was 11.78 miles long. I don't know if maybe Drew doesn't ride in a straight line or if there is something a little off with my bike computer (or his), but I guess if you averaged our mileage together, you'd come out to be about right according to the internet. Either way, it's a little odd.

Much better heart rate today, even with the hill climbing on the bike! Although it's not surprising that running in general would give me a higher heart rate than biking would. Either way, I'm glad to see that it wasn't two days of extremely high effort. Kristin (fellow triathlete & blogger) was kind enough to send me this Joe Friel link about heart rates yesterday. I'm going to have to try out this 30 minute endurance test sometime soon, I think, just to see the results, so stay tuned for more on my maximum heart rate.

Calories: 507
Max HR: 174
Average HR: 158