Lots of Stuff

Let's start with Saturday. I was suppose to do a 5.5 hour ride and I actually completed the ride and I even followed the schedule pretty closely. I got 8 hours of sleep on Friday night and woke up naturally on Saturday. I got kind of a late start since I wanted to be on the road at 7am, but 8:30 will do. The plan was to do 2 loops that were about 50ish miles each and start from my house. That way, I could circle back to my house and do an extended special needs stop to top off my water bottles and stuff. This was critical this weekend because I was dehydrated last weekend. I had to have 6 bottles in 3 hours to see how my body would do. I also used the stock IM InfinIT formulation since I wanted to see how I would handle that alone. I started with 3 bottles of Infinit and a single plain water bottle. I would stop along the way to fill up 2 more water bottles once I poured my second bottle of InfinIT into my aerobottle. I also had some gels as backups though. I also took some Thermolytes with me and some nuun. By the end of the day, I ended up using almost an entire tube of nuun. I also discovered that each tablet of nuun has 360mg of sodium which is quite nice.

Ok, I was off on my ride. The first loop was fairly uneventful. It was slightly overcast and wasn't too hot for Texas summer standards. It was pretty windy though and heading south or west wasn't much fun. I did the 30mile ATC/Bee Caves loop so this was the first time in a few weeks that I saw any hills. They were torturous to me. One thing to note was when I started doing this loop back last winter, it seemed like it took forever. Now, I would consider it a very quick ride. I stopped at Southwest Cycleworks to pee and to fill up my bottles. I had to pee and that was a very good sign. I was also on scheduled drinking 2 bottles every hour. My plan for IMFL is to take 1 bottle of InfinIT in 30 minutes. That will give me 600mg of sodium. The next 30 minutes will be plain water with 1 nuun and then a couple of Thermolytes. Since I don't have this new formulation yet, I had to add some nuun to the InfinIT to give me more electrolytes. Once I was done with this loop, I headed south on Mopac and went and did the Autobahn. At this point, I was in a big gear workout for an hour heading into the wind. This really, really wore me out by the end of the day. I caught the tailwind going back north and headed back to my house.

I took an extended special needs stop. I filled up my InfinIT bottles, grabbed some nuun, had a Rice Krispy treat, and peed again! I was feeling pretty good at this point. My roommate had just woken up and I asked him if he wanted to join me. He said yes so I waited until he got ready. We were dicking around in my driveway and I tried to take off. I was in the wrong gear, I had something in my hand, and I had the wrong cleat clipped in. I fell over. No permanent damage was done except I felt like a dumbass. Well, we headed out and I started to get tired fairly quickly. I think Mile 80 was the breaking point. I wasn't bonking and I wasn't dehydrated, but I was just tired. The hills that day took a lot out of me. I was still pushing a decent amouth though but I just had dead legs. I kept going though, but I really wanted off the bike. Chaffing was in the usual spots, too. It felt like my calves were about to cramp, but they didn't. I also passed 100 miles so this ride was my first century. I was feeling slightly better towards the end because I was getting towards the end of the ride. But I still felt beat.

I finally got home. I logged about 107 miles today. I went inside my house and got my shoes. I headed out for the run and this was the first brick that I've done in almost 2 months. Wow, they hurt a lot. I did 2.5 miles around my neighborhood. My first run on Monday was a 21:45. Today, I did 22:54 so I consider that pretty good consider I'd just ridden 107 miles.

From today, I really need to get my new InfinIT formulation here. Like I said, I'll take 600mg from the InfinIT, and then 360mg from nuun and 300mg from two Thermolytes. That should be enough electrolytes. Also, I should probably take average 5 bottles of fluid instead of 4 over 2 hours. I was feeling a little parched at the end of the ride. I didn't have to pee for the last half of the ride and I thought that I might have stopped sweating too, a sure sign of dehydration. I was sweating on the run though so that's a good sign that I wasn't dehydrated. Also, I think I need to take an extra Gu per hour on the last half of my race.

The rest of the day, I was fatigued, but I really wasn't sore. Well, I'm slighly sore but not bad consider how much I did on Saturday.

Sunday was an aquajog at Barton Springs. I did about 2:15 today which was my longest "run" so far. Richelle let me borrow her aquajogging belt and Laurie let me borrow her waterproof mp3 player. Both of these made my run today much, much better. I peed in each of my first 4 laps eventhough I wasn't drinking water. It took a while before my hip flexors were getting tired. Not much to say about that.

Overall, a good weekend so far and it's not even over yet. I do have a sprint tri in the morning.

Shoe Mileage: 37 miles