I Wonder

We went riding at Bennett Park again on Tuesday. It didn't start out very well. I came down hard on my saddle and injured myself (I won't get any more explicit than that). About 30 minutes into the ride I really wanted to quit because my back and my neck were super sore. I don't know how I could feel so good after finishing the race and feel crappy after 1/2 hour of riding at a leisurely pace. I guess the race pace just finally caught up with me. It's really easy to bail early at Bennett Park, too, because the trail is really twisty but doesn't go very far away from the trailhead.



I stuck it out though. I stopped and rested for a couple minutes and it was better after that. I was able to ride the entire trail. It took about an hour and 15 minutes.



One thing I noticed when I was out there was that in the beginning there were a couple of hills I couldn't get all the way up (or could I). Closer to the end when I was sick of getting off my bike I started making it up hills I originally thought it couldn't. The same thing happened at the end of the Yankee race. What usually happens is that I will shift as far as I can go (in my middle ring) and then if I'm still struggling and the trail is still climbing, I'll hop off and figure I can't make it. What I noticed the last two times I rode is that when I get to that point if I just dig in really hard and start grinding it out, a lot of times I can make it to the top.



The whole thing made me wonder—how many hills have I walked up that I could have ridden? Now I know there are some hills at Yankee that there's no way I could have ridden up, but I bet there were at least a few I walked that I didn't have to walk.



I've been looking ahead to some of the races we have later this summer, particularly the six hours of Drummond Island we're going to attempt. I need to figure out how to train for an endurance race, but I'm really excited about it. One thing I do know is that after we get back from Key West I need to start riding a lot longer rides and doing multiple laps of a trail instead of one.