I showed up, of course, 30 minutes early to find a large group of road bikers all ready to go, looking very professional (and thus kind of scary) listening to a set of coaches. They were clearly Team in Training, so I ran across the road and joined the ranks. After some sidelong glances (they were all dressed in brightly colored cycling windbreakers, I in an REI fleece and clearly out of place), an administrative TNT woman approached me and asked me sotto voce if perhaps I was with the Tri team, and if I was, that perhaps I'd be more comfortable down the road where the Tri team was meeting. This was a century cycling group, and clearly I was in the wrong place. (A century = 100 miles and sounds perfectly awful if you ask me. Thank you no.)
Oops.
After my inauspicious start I foudn the Tri team and we spent a good long while discussing the routes, breaking into two groups (longer distance ride and shorter distance ride). I decided to go with the second, shorter distance ride as I had not been on my bike in, oh, over a year and couldn't really remember how the gears worked. At any rate, the shorter distance riders head out for an ~8 mile ride out-and-back along Canada Road. It really was lovely (once I remembered how to shift), and I felt pretty good. Immediately after the bike we were to change into running shoes (a la the tri transition) and head out for a short 15-minute out-and-back run. I of course didn't have my watch, so I just ran for what felt like 7.5 minutes out but in reality was more like 12. I returned to my friend Cara telling me she was worried that I'd been gone so long and was about to send out a search party. And lucky you - they have photographers at all the workouts! Photos of me rocking:
Okay, so we wear name tags in the shape of turtles. There are like 100 of us so it helps. And I have no idea what I'm trying to say to the camera in the last photo, but apparently we were at the gun show.
The rest of Saturday involved a short nap and then a drive over to Santa Cruz for my friend Becky's big going away bash. We started at her boss's house and ended at a bar in Santa Cruz, where I talked with a woman in the department I haven't seen a while who told me I'd lost a lot of weight.
I get that a lot - people I haven't seen in a while, no matter what my weight is, seem to remember me as being much heavier or something, and they almost always tell me I've lost a lot of weight. Hm.
Anyway, I spent the night at Becky's on a thermarest on the floor. Not my best night's sleep, and when I woke up arund 5:45 I decided to just get up and head home so I could get an hour or so in my own bed before another brick workout.
This workout on Sunday morning was a "captain's workout," which is an informal workout run by one of the TNT "captains" - and is just for fun, or for extra training, or whatever. My big issue with the bike is that I just don't know where to go, and don't like not having a course mapped out before I take off, so I'm trying to go to every bike workout I can to learn good places to ride.
We rode a quick out-and-back warm up that had some rolling hills, and then rode a ~2 mile loop for ~45 minutes. The loop was in a gorgeous residential neighborhood in Los Altos Hills (very posh), so there was lots to look at, and I felt really good until we got The Hill. For seasoned riders I'm sure it wasn't that hard, but I probably could have walked up the hill faster than I was riding, and was sorely disappointed when I realized my bike didn't have any more gears.
But, I fit in three loops, and then shifted to the out-and-back run of 10 minutes each direction. That felt surprisingly good and I think I may be building leg strength! Very excited about that. I took off immediately afterwards and after a long shower I tried to read but ended up closing my eyes "just for a minute."
Three hours later...
Guess I needed the sleep! Last night I was in bed at 9:30 and that was a stretch. Tonight it's water polo and hopefully we actually have a workout! I hear they raised the pool temp to 81 (which means it'll probably hover around 78-79 if it stays covered)...
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