Epic ride!

Yes, our average mph comes out incredibly slow, not helped by the fact that I was riding the bad-road steep downhills of River Road on my brakes at 10mph for the last forty minutes of the ride - somehow I had thought we had parked at the NEAR end of the park, not the far end, and it seemed unbelievable to me that we still had so much longer to ride! This is not an exaggeration re: the effect on speed/mileage - I think we were riding as strongly or more strongly as we did in early May, but that our route was slightly different and included one major additional climb and that I also just slowed down hugely because of this question of nerve-racking downhills in the home stretch...

(NB said park is clearly not suitable for my Miles of Nowhere next weekend, and conversation with Lauren led to me embracing wonderful option I hadn't thought of, which is to do it in Prospect Park during the day on Friday - that park has shorter road loop than Central Park, so it truly is a demented undertaking in the spirit of the Miles of Nowhere event, but it is FAR less crowded than Central Park - I'll plan to get there [on the subway - this is a more Davidsonian plan than having to ride over bridges!] around 9am when the park closes to traffic, and just keep on riding round and round until I am done! Friday instead of Saturday because parks are always less crowded on a weekday, and my schedule is pretty open these days.)

We really got almost all the way to Bear Mountain Bridge. It was a very warm day, not so comfortable once you've been out there for a while but good from the point of view of heat acclimation. In spite of being prepared for it this time, I still found the road crossing on the way back from Haverstraw onto 9W quite horrible, and also had a minor freakout after riding next to the PRECIPICE just before you come to Bear Mountain Bridge, but I was able in each case to regroup fairly quickly.

The new short-fingered gloves I got to replace the old short-fingered ones that were so strikingly less comfortable than my long-fingered ones have completely blistered the heels of my hands; clearly they are unusable by me for long rides! (I hold on too hard too, and in fact I would say sore hands were the thing I was most painfully conscious of during last hour of riding esp. given riding-on-the-brakes issue, but blistering on this scale and in this location has not happened to me before!) I will just use the old ones, or wear my full-fingered ones for the race if it is not an excessively hot day...

The new pair of bike shorts I acquired on deep discount are not really as comfortable as my funny-looking white ones, though they were not terrible, and I now think it's worth trying to see if I couldn't find a pair of tri shorts that I could stand to wear for the whole race - it is true I will be on the bike longer than Lauren was in her IM last year, but she had some CW-X endurance-specific ones that she found tolerable. Have to investigate this ASAP - would certainly save me a lot of time in transitions.

I fueled much better than last time, wasn't so much metabolically fading at end, but the heat slightly cancels that out and then it also seems to me clear that however long a ride you do, the last half-hour where you sort of thought you would be done already is mentally and physically arduous!

Am going to take off - family picnic in NJ, am trying to avoid further colds by not getting up too early, will run Monday morning instead! Only reason to do it tomorrow would be due to the contribution it would make to the week's slightly meager training hours, and that is not a good reason at all. Total hours for the week: 12:36. Next week I will have an amazing mega-week!

By the numbers (don't have elevation numbers, but it's really considerable, good preparation for CDA as I think we must have done the whole climbing equivalent of that 112-mile leg over about 72 miles):

6:04:59
71.23 mi. (11.7 avg mph)
avg HR 135, max HR 165

zone 1: 1:19:59
zone 2: 2:32:35
zone 3: 1:00:41
zone 4: 1:01:10
zone 5: 0:01:18