Not Keeping Up With The Joneses

I learned an important lesson yesterday, and it may seem fairly obvious. Suppose you signed up for a long, difficult race with a group of people and started training with them. Now suppose you dropped out of the race, and therefore stopped the training as well. Several weeks later, you should not - and I can't stress this enough - you should NOT get up one morning and just think you can join the group for one of their training rides.

I think it's been 3 weeks since I've been on my bike and thought it was time I did another ride. The Oceanside Half-Ironman team had their ride and I went along. I don't know what they were thinking, but some reason they seemed to be doing a pace 2-3mph faster than what we usually do. It killed me. They wanted to finish the ride with some steep hill climbing and i just surrendered and went back to the car. I was wiped out for the rest of the day.

The scary thing is that these are some of the same people who I have to train for Ironman Wisconsin with. I ain't ready.