This time was a blast. It all felt so familiar this time. It just fit like an old glove. Saturday was a perfect day outside and I started making great time. At the beginning there, I sort of felt it. I hadn't been training nearly as much this time around and at the start on the route, I was finding the inclines a little troublesome. I started to think to myself, "Oh shit, what the hell was I thinking not really training for this." I think it was just because it was early. I hadn't really warmed up or anything. There wasn't anything to consume at the start of the ride and I only had enough produce to make like 16 oz of Juice... TOTAL. I was kinda starting with my internal gas light on. No good.
I ended up scarfing down half of a big-assed brownie I bought at some stoner-themed sandwich shop the night before. Good thing I decided to take it with. It definitely came in handy at this point. I got the rust sort of knocked off for the morning and as my body actually warmed up, then came the speed. Last year, everybody I saw out on the road with a bike had passed me up and I was pretty much by myself. This year, I was the one doing the passing. I charged by a group of 3 on carbon fiber bikes about 3-4 miles into the ride... uphill... I got to the first rest stop and there was only one couple there. A brother and sister. The brother is from somewhere down in CA, and the sister lives in Sequim. WA. They decided to do this ride because it met in the middle and neither one of them had to travel a great distance to get here. Two more people showed up. The couple looked a bit familiar. Turns out they were the same couple I met at this exact spot last year. They happened to be the first group of people I sped past when heading up the his around mile 3-4. This was the guy that originally called my bike a "tank". It was definitely cool running into them again this time. He was like "it's great to see you're still out here doing this stuff". I do love how nice some of these cyclists are out here. It definitely feels good to keep you going.
I kept up with all these people for the majority of the ride. Or, well, they kept up with me I guess. They were only a few minutes behind whenever I reached the next rest stop. I got to feel like the "expert" with the brother/sister, because they'd never done this ride before. In fact, I hadn't realized that last year was basically the first year, they even held this event. I got to tell them about the hills which is something I wished I would've known about last year to mentally prepare. OOH and on that note.
I handled those hills like a BOSS!
Last year, I was crawling up them at maybe 3mph. Just ridiculous. This year, I managed to maintain a steady 6 mph up the entire hill. That felt pretty badass. The downhill, I managed to smoke my last Max speed record of 39mph, with a smokin' 46.6mph!
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| Flax field |
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| Clover field |
The day was perfect. The weather was perfect. The ride was beautiful and scenic. I didn't do too many pictures this time around since I took a lot last year. I'd already done a timelapse of the ride before so this time, I just concentrated on making a fairly good time and trying to make it through all of the rough spots as efficiently as possible. I think I did fairly well. So much fun.
The next day was Mother's day. Zu had been planning to go on this Eugene Cyclofemme ride celebrating women on bicycles. Sounded like fun. She mentioned that they'd like to celebrate the ride with skirts and balloons and I made a joke saying "well, I don't have a skirt to ride in"... well, turns out we took care of that on Saturday after the metric century. We rode over to the closest downtown St Vincent De Paul and did a quick bit of skirt shopping. I found the perfect one (it matched my hat). $2.99. Done!The ride on Sunday was way super laid back but really fun. I think the general pace was about 6mph (the speed I was going up those ridiculous hills in Springfield), But with the music going and everybody just having a blast, it was impossible to not have fun.
Towards the end, my damn skirt got caught or something happened and I totally went down in a hilariously spectacular fashion. Thankfully I got out of it relatively unscathed which I'm especially thankful for since it was one of the rare times I wasn't wearing a helmet. Took the fall like a stunt man though. Kinda wish someone recorded it.
This week in P90X felt pretty awesome. We've both been steadily kicking it up a notch with the moves here and there. I got Zulema thinking about and increasing her weight. She needs to realize that if she's doing high rep counts, then she definitely needs to be upping her weight. She needs to be barely making those upper limits of her preferred rep counts to really be making a difference. I know it's tough because we're broke as hell so we can't afford a bunch of weights to share between us. I'm kinda at that point where I'm starting to outgrow my weights a little again too.
I've also been working really hard on hitting all of the poses in Yoga X. I've pretty much got all of them down... except crane. I've been chasing after crane forever and each week I keep getting a little bit closer. Yesterday, I was actually able to hold it for a few seconds before falling on my face this time. I feel like now I'm sort of just up against a mental block. I think my body can handle it though so in time I guess. Until then, there's always this hilarity.
I also ended up recording my runs through shoulder stands and ploughs. I'd never actually seen how I looked and while I've got a ways to go, this still looks impressive as hell. It's hard to believe I've become this flexible.
It's cool watching Zu making these improvements as we go along. I feel like she's picking things up a lot faster than I did my first time around. Though, we are basically halfway through this entire thing so that feels good. I think she's starting to get more into it and resent it less. This pleases me. My evil plan of getting her to stop hating and maybe start actually enjoying working out might still be on track. Muahahahaha.
The May Challenge of getting in 5 servings of fruit/vegetables has been going well. I've basically been knocking them out every morning with a smoothie or juice. Typically, on Fridays, I end up doing a smoothie because I'm just too lazy to do all the juicing stuff. It's pretty quick to handle anyway. So what I have up is what I call the PBJM (Peanutbutter, Jelly, and Mint) Sounds weird, but tastes pretty good.
PBJM Smoothie:
3-4 Leaves of Kale
1&1/2 - 2 cups strawberries
1 banana
1-2 tbsp peanutbutter
1 tbsp chia seeds
2 sprigs of mint
almond milk to consistency.
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