Sick Brick

Happy Easter everyone.

I bricked myself sick today. Wildflower is in less than a month and I wanted to get a big brick workout in: 40 miles on the bike (with hills) and 1 hour of running (with hill.) Last night I plotted out a very general route and figured I would just tweak the mileage along the way. I got on my bike this morning only to discover that the battery on my odometer was dead. Now some of you may think "ride free! just go, don't worry about the numbers!" No. Wildflower is gonna be tough and I wanted to work on my pacing, so I'd know what a 12mph uphill climb feels like, or an 8mph, or a 2 mph. I figured I'd take a slight detour to the bike shop for a replacement. Oh wait, it's Easter. Everything is closed. Stopped by a -Eleven. They don't have watch batteries. So I just gave up.

In order to do several hills (small, medium, large) I had to fight through a lot of traffic. Which I hate. It was just one traffic light after another, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I was too hot climbing the first big hill because of all my layers but that problem didn't last long because I must have climbed right into the cloud layer where it was raining. Swell. In a period of about 10 minutes I went from sweating like a pig to freezing my butt off.

I'm too tired to make the chart nice and pretty, but here's today's ride vs. Wildflower. They are the same vertical and horizontal scale. Wildflower is 56 miles with a 1000 foot rise lowest-point-to-highest; today I did 45 miles with 1300 feet. So I think I did pretty well:



After that I did a 5.5 mile run with a 300' climb (Wildflower has 400', tough). This was my usual Griffith Park course, but instead of the nice open roadways for me to run on I had to deal with thousands of people who wanted to have a nice Easter Picnic in the park. When the cars weren't whizzing by me I was dodging people getting out of their cars parked on the street. Next year, stay home everybody. The good news is that I usually run this hill doing 9.5-9.8 minute miles; after the bike ride, I did 9.7s. Yay me.

Got home, soaked in cold tub a short while, and ate lunch, completely forgetting the fact that I ate a sandwich on the bike. But I guess if the body wants it, give it. I then crashed on the couch for about 3 hours and woke up in a sweat. Now I'm sick. I think all the activity plus the rain was a little too much. I'm taking a day or two off; I deserve it.