rumrunn6

FWIW - last night I felt slow & my computer confirmed it

bruce19

[QUOTE=Maelochs;19911769

Best thing I can do is take each ride as its own thing. As Mr. Brucwe19 says:
last night I went for a ride with great excitement---I had just put new wheels and tires on my rain bike and was eager to see if I could feel a difference.

Five miles in I got a flat. Then my pump didn't work because all that rain riding had filled it with water and silt.

So ... I enjoyed a five-mile walk home, pushing my bike.

I had a decent stroll, and I still get to be excited to see how the new wheels and tires work.[/QUOTE]

To my point about expectation and your excellent example of how to turn disappointment into opportunity....Today I did my 6.3 mi. TT. I do this about once a month to measure my fitness during the season. Since I'm now 71 I also like see if I'm slowing down. Last month I did a PB at 18.8 mph in "calm" wind conditions. This route is an out and back with about 250 ft. of elevation. There's also a flat .8 mi. Strava segment. My PB on that, again last month. is 24.2 mph. Today I determined was my day to shatter records. I felt great warming up. I set out in the drops and flew down the road with a 3 mph wind at my back. When I hit the start of that Strava segment I was averaging 19.5 mph. I'm usually 1 mph slower. Then I cranked it up on the segment. I felt strong and was just cranking it out. Couldn't read my Garmin clearly thanks to glare. Hit the end of the segment and did the turn around quickly. Came back on that first bit much better than usual. With about 2 1/2 mi to go I turned west into that now 4 mph wind. Still, I was flying...going over the two rises in the big ring. The last 1/2 mi. stretch was also really quick. Shut down my Garmin without checking the data. No doubt I had hit my 19 mph TT goal and my 25 mph segment goal. Uploaded to Garmin Connect and Strava. Only 18.6 mph for the TT and almost 4 mph SLOWER on the segment. WTF!!. It felt like the best TT I've ever done but the data did not reflect that. Disappointment. Then I thought..."But, what a great ride. What a great feeling." Now I'm basking in the glow of the memory of a great ride and the gratitude that at age 71 I can still feel like an athlete. Simple little shift in the story I tell myself. The rest of life works that way too.

speedlever

Reading this on my iPad at the moment. This forum needs a like button!

One of the ways I gauge a ride is how quickly I tire and how long it takes me to recover riding the rolling hills where I ride. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty slow this early since I’ve resumed riding, but some days I feel like I can spin up the hills and recover quickly, other days I just grind up the hills and seem to recover slowly.

I find I have 2 primary measures:
1) lungs
2) legs

They each have their own level of endurance and recovery. And they both vary day to day. Most often the legs tire first, followed by the lungs.

elocs

I don't have "rides" because my bike is my transportation for getting from point A to point B and back again, sometimes pulling my cargo trailer and hauling what I need to haul. It makes absolutely no difference to me how fast I go because even if I were to go 50% faster than I do it would only make a difference of a few minutes so it's not worth it to me.
As far as distance goes, I stick with the shortest distance possible that is the most safe.
One of the beauties of being retired is that if I don't feel like riding--I don't, and I don't feel guilty about it in the least.

Choctaw

Had this today on a 30 mile gravel grind after a rain. I still feel like crap and the ride wasn't fun at all. That's my reality.

Maelochs

That's really a grind.

rydabent

I think if you distill all of these posts, most everyone seems to have days that are better than others. OTOH I bet that most all of us do not stop riding. That is a good thing.

After all a bad day on the bike is better than a good day at work.

bruce19

When I stopped caring about things like MPH and distance my rides got better. FWIW that doesn't come easy for me.

speedlever

Yeah, but my thrust was the disparity between how I felt *before* the ride vs how I felt during the ride. It just struck me odd that I could feel strong before a ride and yet find I tired quickly and recovered slowly whereas other days I felt just meh but did not tire quickly and recovered swiftly. Sorta a physical oxymoron, if you will.

Maelochs

All kinds of stuff like that.

I have taken rides where I prepped all day (and part of the night before) making very sure to saturate my tissues with water, eating just right so I would have lots of energy, planning a "Big Ride...." only to find out after six miles that I was doing 12 miles that day, because my body said "No."

I sure felt ready when I started .....

speedlever

I’m too much like a light switch, either all or nothing. I need to be more flexible, so I can accommodate changes to my plan better. And try as I might, I still seem to care more about speed and distance than I should. So if my plan to do a metric gets trashed before I even get out the door, some days (like today), I don’t get out at all. Which will bug me when it’s a pretty day and I let it go by without a ride. Come winter, I’ll be wishing for good days to ride.

caloso

Don't give up on yourself too soon. Can't tell you how many times I've gone out and felt like absolute dog crap for the first hour and then things got better, sometimes had my best results/training numbers by the end.

Maelochs

I stopped using cycling computers and switched to a GPS-based phone app ... and I turn the screen off. It bugged me that to often while riding I would look down at the computer to assess my ride, instead of looking around at the scenery and feeling how I actually felt.

I still have all the data at the end of the ride---more in fact, because I can see speed and slope at any point around the whole ride and plot speed and grade against overall elevation, distance, and time. Thing is, my ride is over before I download all that.

Some days I don't ride when I could ... some days it's borderline ... but at our age, missing too many days ... there aren't too many days left.

Unless health or injury or my schedule won't let me ... I want to go out even if it is just a ten-mile spin around the neighborhood.

speedlever

Lol. I still think I’m gonna live forever!

RockiesDad

I'm in it for fun and recreation. Being cold and wet would be considered a "bad ride" in my opinion. Call me a wienie but I don't care what you think. :-)

Its usually hard to start but then after a few miles I start getting into it and start having fun. At the end of my ride I say to myself that wasn't too bad...

jon c. 

I'm very much the same way. Some days I'm feeling great and think I'll be riding with strong legs, only to feel a bit powerless when I get out there. And some days I start out feeling like death warmed over and I suddenly realize I feel like I'm cruising with the greatest of ease. There is generally no correlation to how I feel before riding and how I feel when I'm riding. The upside of that is a lot of days when I have to force myself to get my butt on the saddle, I end up being really glad that I did.

Joe Bikerider

One of the things I read quite a while ago in the long distance forum was about getting going. In this case after a long ride and a rest how hard it could be to go. The poster suggested a trick of thinking "just go for 10 minutes". And giving himself the option of turning back. Seems he never did. After 10 minutes he was getting in the groove and feeling better so he kept going everytime.

Reminds me of how I learned to climb Mt Diablo. I was intimidated by the whole climb so would never start. Some how along the way I realized that I could turn around anytime I wanted. Nobody was watching. This was just about me and me and the mountain was there too but me was most important.

I was starting on the North side, near my house. At first I would get past the gate and then just a ways up the valley and that was it. After a while I could get up to the ranch and make it around the hairpin. Then up to the junction.

Each time I turned around it was not a failure just a thing that happened and the ride back was always a treat.

After the junction there are a couple of steep uphill turns and then a long flattish section with the peak towering above. And sure enough I started making it regularly.

So what's the point of all this? Just do it. Turn back when you want. Don't worry about the rest of the world. Even if you never make it you did something for yourself. Remember him? He matters.

52telecaster

i think commuting is the key for me. i do it every day no matter how it feels. its just part of the day, like working.

Rick@OCRR

I must be the exception (and/or addicted to cycling!) but I always want to ride; anytime I have a few minutes and the other demands of real life have been satisfied (for awhile).

Okay, living Southern California the weather is more often "ride-able" then in other parts of the country (or the world) but having said that, I enjoy riding in the rain, in cool weather, super hot weather, winds, whatever.

Sure, icy roads are kind of scary (up in the mountains in the winter) and snow will stop me since I don't have a FAT bike. But otherwise I just go for it!

Rick / OCRR (67 years)

Biker395 

Yea, me too. There are days I'm raring to get out and ride, and days when I'm not.

But every weekday, it's either that or this, so off on the bike I go.

speedlever

That would be a pretty picture if one didn't know what it represented!

Methinks you SoCal guys are a different breed anyway.

caloso

Is that the Hollywood Fwy? My wife was a visiting prof at SC one semester and was living in Hollywood with a colleague. The traffic was crazy unpredictable. Could take 20 minutes or 90 to get to campus for her.

Maelochs

it represents people paying the highest cost of living for the lowest quality of life.

Biker395 

Mongrels, one and all. lol

That's really part of the problem. In SoCal, you can run into traffic any time, any where. I have sat in traffic jams at 1AM. Holy crap.

That's the San Diego Freeway (the 405), looking up towards West LA and UCLA. But it might as well be the Hollywood Freeway. They're all bad.

Eh ... that's debatable. The worst things about SoCal are:

1. Cost of living
2. Traffic
3. Crime
4. Air quality

For me:

1. I can afford it (well ... so far).
2. I commute by bike and get to ride to and from work along the Santa Monica Bay. I'm self-employed and can (and do) also work from home and modify my schedule to minimize traffic.
3. I live near the beach ... not a lot of crime.
4. The air quality near the coast is great.

We also have stellar weather and geography that allows me to ride a bike year round and ski through July.

Maelochs

nah ... because you aren't one of the poor folks slowly dying in traffic in that picture. You are out riding or walking on the beach.
Yeah, see what you have to sacrifice? No skiing in August?. What would possess a person to put up with that?

You are the rarity .... One of the lucky few not trapped in four hours of gridlock every day.

For all those fools on the highway .... Great. Keeps them off the good cycling roads, I guess.