Back to work, you!
So I have been holding out on you, readers. Both of you. I got laid off last april. I didn’t want to post about it here because there wasn’t a direct tie to cycling. And because I didn’t want to seem like I was whining. But now it’s time to own up, because a couple weeks ago I went back to work.
One great thing, at least in theory, about being laid off was that I could ride as much as I wanted to. It turns out that I was already riding about as much as I could stand. I can get my CTL up to about 120 and that’s it for me… any more and I’m in trouble. (Translation for people who aren’t wattage weenies: for me that’s a bunch of 15-18 hour weeks in a row, with a lot of hard climbing). “In trouble” in this case means being too tired to think and needing a second nap after a ride to recover from the first post-ride nap. Even though I wasn’t using any software to monitor it (WKO+ being busted on my Linux box and me not having written the Performance Monitor for GoldenCheetah yet) I managed to hit 121.8 right before the Everest Challenge, just like I’d planned. Maybe training by feel isn’t so bad after all.
I did put in more hours but it was mostly low intensity stuff. Like the Chain Reaction “after” ride… the guys who don’t have to be into work right away go out relatively flat Canada rd. and back at a mellow pace. It’s social and adds about 45 minutes but not a lot of training stress. And I could do a longer “endurance” paced climbing ride during the week as well.
But the best part of being out of work was being able to start my rides a bit later in the morning, so the latter part of the ride would be after the morning commute.
But now that I am back to work I am back to a normal schedule as well. Right now I am in base training but soon I will be getting up early (4:30 instead of sleeping in till 5am) and doing intervals in the dark, just like last year.