Long Cruise Then Intervals

Today for my “hard leg day” ride I took my recumbent southeast towards Gilroy and back. I started out with two hours at a brisk tempo, then finished up with some intervals. The ride was challenging but enjoyable. This was also good mindfulness training- it takes concentration to keep the pace brisk but steady during the tempo portion. Intervals bring up the whiny part of your brain (“I don’t want to keep going, this is uncomfortable!”) and it’s good mental training to just note these thoughts but not give in to them.

I’ve recently added some longer intervals to my session to better prepare me for challenges like the Llagas hill climb.

I uploaded this activity to Strava (https://www.strava.com, see member “rich king”) to see if it would pick out any segments, and it found several. Part of my ride went on Dryden road which turns into Crews road. There is a challenging little uphill called the “Crews bump”, it turned out I was number 4 out of 11 in my age group that have done that segment. My best effort was in November last year, on my upright, with a time of 6 min 46 sec. I was a little slower today on the ‘bent. I obviously can improve that, because I didn’t know this was a segment so I’ve never focussed especially on my effort over the “bump”. It’s nice to have these local challenges for motivation.