A fairly boring week of running/jumping/playing, as the weather didn’t want to work with me, and anyways, I had a music show this weekend.
Monday – legs finally protested with acute soreness, but not so much worrying fatigue (which is good!), so time to rest them – just commuting by bike, today… which you can call, “recovery riding”, if you want, I won’t stop you. I call it, “getting coffee downtown and nicking the café’s internet connection for far too long” (tip well, people)
Gym time: easy on the shoulder, so no dips (bench press completely out of the question for me), but plenty of pullups, seated rows, grip work, rotator cuff PT, leg PT, and, uh, handstands. Who doesn’t like handstands? That sort of isometric work seems to be OK with my current weak shoulder and I need something to balance out all that back work.
Moving through another block of upper-body work to get a little bit farther toward my goal of a 15-pullup set (best effort this year: 13), and general fitness for climbing on things like cliffs and plastic cliffs you may find inside, which I’ll start up again, soon enough. No lower body, as I’d like to be somewhat fresh tomorrow for a ride or a run.
Tuesday – road run – 11 miles. Raining, would rather ride bikes. Not sure what the pace was (GPS technical problems), but it felt good. Ran a new route (for me) from Arvada to the Highlands Neighborhood in Denver, which was sort of wild to think about. Better route reversing the direction, as the steeper climb is on Tennyson, not Lowell. Started the run at around 11:30 pm – sometimes I get a little antsy, after a long day working. Would like to find more climbs on my road runs, as running on pavement isn’t the most exciting thing to do, and the grade of road hill climbs is somewhat laughable to my now fairly mild, as I’ve been running trails of 25% grade (which, you know, I also die on). Getting 1,000 feet of elevation gain running from my house/to my house would be kind of awesome. I guess I’ll have to digress into hill repeats, but that would almost feel like I’m exercising.
Wednesday – neighborhood run 8 miles. Not what I wanted to do, but more work to do and more rain falling, making me not want to ride bikes.
Thursday – cycled 46 mostly flat miles. Time on the bike! Not the route I wanted to take, but I had band practice in the afternoon, and wanted to hit the gym, and this route gets me downtown at the end, so I’ll take it. Happy the pace wasn’t too off of what I’m usually capable of, despite the 2 runs this week. I feel a little lame to say this, but I’m at basically the fastest pace I can go, using this bike – I’m just at the limit of efficiency you can pedal a 42 x 17 gear ratio for this sort of course 20-ish mph is a fine speed at any ratio. I’m curious myself what I’d do with a steeper 48 x 16 ratio. And maybe I’m just fooling myself, as I go about 1 mph faster on my road bike, which sounds crazy! Crazy. Spin to win!
After the ride, I did some time in the gym, but was running out of time and wanted again to be nice to my shoulder, so I cut it short after back work – and a little grip work – and there’s just so much grip work you can do at a regular gym and think it’s going to benefit your climbing. Happy to do 5 sets of 8 pullups – basically where I’m at before Arizona. Wanted to do some weighted pullups, as I’ll just plateau doing pullups with body weight, but the harness thing that allows you to do this was mysteriously missing or I just had no idea how to use the equipment that looks almost like the harness I needed. Alas.
And that, was basically my week. Not the week I had planned – my hope was to take an overnighter on Tue/Wed and do some alpine routes, but the weather in the mountains put a dent in that plan, having my instead run in rain, as it snowed higher up. Wanted a Big Something, as the rest of the week was given up to a very different life of being part of a music project; Thursday had band practice and Saturday was our show; Sunday had me going to see one of my favorite groups play a different show. Still funny, I rode about 50 miles on Saturday/Sunday, just going to and from downtown from my house a couple of times.
