The First Snag in Training

This week we planned on doing a 48 Mile ride down into Washington DC, and then out towards Potomac, MD. The route was mapped, sandwiches and granola bars were made, the bike was lubed up, and we were outside my apartment at 7:30 ready to go... And Ben's brakes weren't working. This was an inevitability. Not the brakes part, but the part about something holding us up unexpectedly. It was bound to happen, at some point in the training we were going to get hung up on something that we could not predict, and it happened yesterday.

My initial thought was 'great, I didn't really want to go biking almost 50 miles today anyway, cause that's a lot of work to do, and it'll make my legs hurt.' However, I pushed through that and decided, with the suggestion of my beautiful fiancee, to take this opportunity and do something a little different. Colleen suggested that I do a 'tempo run', where I go a shorter distance but push myself to focus on my speed, and that's exactly what I did. I took my normal route to work + about 5 more miles out, but instead of leisurely riding, I pushed myself harder than normal. I average generally between 10-12 MPH when riding to and from work, but I made it a goal of myself to ride 14+ as much as possible yesterday. The result was covering just over 31 miles in exactly 2 hours. That's an average of over 15 MPH, which is quite impressive, especially on the bike path.