sporty: April 2006 Archives

Today will be the first time all season that I will have missed my long ride for the weekend. I have a huge paper due tomorrow (my final for one of my classes), and there is just no way it is going to get done if I ride long. Not to mention that the weather is WAY less than inviting. Its been rainy and windy all weekend and while the sun is trying to peak out from the clouds now, it looks like the sky could open up again any minute.

I was really hoping to get in a good 90 miler today, which would have been my longest ride yet this season. I've only got 4 or 5 more long rides before CDA, so at this point, each of these is pretty damn important.

I've got a rest week coming up in a few weeks, so depending on whether or not I feel rested by the time I get to the end of that rest week, I might do a longer than normal ride (rest-week wise) at the end of that week. BUT thats the same weekend as Collegiate Roadie Nat's (yay!!!!!), AND in the middle of finals, so I'm not sure it wil happen. We'll see. For now, I will just sit here and work on my paper and be bummed.

On a long ride last weekend the boyfriend and I were discussing which sport was tougher - cycling or running. Now, you have to take anything I have to say on this subject with a grain of salt, seeing as I'm equally inept at both. But I'm improving (finally), which is exciting, really exciting.

Anyway, my take on this debate is that cycling is the tougher sport. After several years of Ironman I have done my share of long runs and rides and I'm convinced that on a normal day cycling is tougher. There's just so much that comes into play (read: its really friggin windy here, and the wind sucks way WAY more when you're riding than it does when you're running). Now, I have to qualify my statement that cycling is more grueling by saying that on a bad day, when you don't feel great, running is just HARD. it hurts and sometimes it takes a helluva lot of energy and mental fortitude just to RUN. Cycling is rarely THAT hard. Its rare that I start a long ride thinking "man, I feel like crap", but the on the occaision that I start a long run feeling like that I know that its going to hurt very, very bad.

This was the situation today when I headed out the door for my long run. I felt like CRAP for the first 30-40 minutes. My calves were ridiculously tight and I couldn't get them loosened up for the life of me. I know that if I can make it through the 40 minute mark, I usually feel a whole lot better, which was the case today. So I pushed on. And on. And on. My long runs are usually an out and back along the lake - I like long out and backs because I feel like all I have to do is get out to my farthest point, and then its easy - I just have to get home. I should have noticed how much my quads were hurting today on my way out. When I turned around at 1:20, I realized that it was going to be a long, LONG run home.

I'm usually pretty happy for about two hours of my long runs, and after that it just starts to hurt. But this was the worst I've hurt on a long run since ... Ironman maybe. My quads and hip flexors were ACHING and at one point I was really worried about my ability to get home. Not as in, worried about my ability to RUN home, but worried about my ability to get home at all. Big time ouch.

I ended up running 2:30 and walking the last 15 minutes. Thats a long run, but not THAT much longer than last week. OH but it HURTS.

Is it taper time yet????????