It's Too Dark To See My Cadence Monitor

OK, so my week-long workout plan did not go according to plan yesterday. I was supposed to meet Laura for a nice long swim, but when I woke up at 5:30 yesterday morning, I found an e-mail from her saying that she couldn't find the pass for the pool. We texted back and forth and it ended up that we wouldn't meet for a swim. I thought that I could just sleep for another half an hour and then get up to go for a bike ride. Except that I forgot to get up in a half hour and instead I just slept until I had to wake up for work.

I was telling myself all day yesterday that it was okay and that I could go biking after work. Except that when I got home from work, all I really wanted to do was keep unpacking and make this apartment more presentable. I actually accomplished a huge amount last night and now there are only 2.5 more boxes to unpack (well, one is to go to storage and 0.5 is stuff to sell on Ebay, so it's really more like 1 box to unpack). There are still a lot of things just lying around, but I'm hoping to finish up tonight so that this isn't a distraction any more!

This morning was the Terrier brick. They're quickly coming to an end (the last one is September 24), which I'm sad about. I'm not ready for it to be fall/winter again. I feel like I barely got a summer with all the rain we had here in NYC. I got to practice just in time this morning to hear Robert tell us the workout and then we all headed out.

The workout started with a 10:00 warm-up and then we were supposed to ride for an hour total, keeping our cadence above 95. It's so dark in the mornings now that it's almost impossible to see anything, let alone a small little number on a small little bike computer. I did the best I could and kept trying to see the cadence when I went under a streetlight. I spent a lot of time over 100, but the hills were almost murder on my legs. I normally try to keep it as high as I can, even on the hills, but I'd say I'm usually more like 85 on the hills instead of 95+. What a difference those extra 10 strokes make. This is probably also another reason why you should ride your bike more than once a week like I've been doing.

In total, I rode for 52:33 and went 12.54 miles (14.32 MPH average). I'm planning on going riding again tomorrow morning and I think I'm just going to focus on the hills. At least that's my plan for now. It's not set in stone.

The bike was to be followed by a 20 minute run. Every 4 minutes, we were supposed to do a 1 minute pick-up at our 5K race pace. Since I have no idea what my 5K race pace would be since I've never run a stand-alone 5K, I just ran faster than I was the rest of the time. I also spaced the intervals a little bit closer together than 4:00 minutes, since I did 5 of them in 16 minutes. It took me exactly 16:00 to run the lower loop in the park, which was 1.77 miles (9:02 pace). I decided that I wanted to run for all 20 minutes instead of stopping when I got back to where I had started from, so I ran around the Cherry Hill Fountain loop. In total, I ran for 20:03 and went 2.21 miles (9:04 pace).

I don't have any fancy HR data today. On Tuesday I got some sort of weird chafing from the strap. Although it doesn't really hurt to have anything against it, I didn't want to take any chances and make it worse. Additionally, Robert had told us to ignore our HR monitors if we had them on while we were biking because they were bound to spike with the high cadence on the hills. So, I didn't really need it anyway.