Saturday

The alarm clock on my watch would not stop beeping at me. I'm pretty sure I yelled at it to stop. Meg doesn't seem to remember. It was 6:20am yesterday (Saturday) morning. I had just finished a tough week at work and with training and was exhausted. All I wanted was some more sleep. I got up to brush my teeth and looked at myself in the mirror..."what the hell am I doing?" Slowly but surely, I was waking up however and after a lot of coffee and some breakfast I had my bike loaded and kissed the bride-to-be on my way out for another solo century ride.

What I am doing is training for Ironman Arizona. Today we are roughly three months away from toeing the line in Tempe. Yesterday was one of those days when a 5+ hour bike ride followed by a transition run sounded absolutely terrible. Yet, I've learned you have to take baby steps. It's much like running the marathon. You can't focus on the 24 miles left to go, but instead you focus on your next 5k or 10k, etc.

So, I head out. I have a bottle filled with carbo pro and electrolytes plus another bottle of water. I have a GU and a Cliff bar in case I get really hungry. I'm trying to train my buddy to work on just the carbo pro and electrolytes for the majority of the 112 mile bike - put realize after a few 5+ hour rides I will probably need to incorporate some more food. I will have GU present and will probably have some cut up power bars in a bento box or something. Anyways, like I said...I was off.

I'm about 30 min into the ride and see a guy setting up what appears to be a finish line on McKenzie View rd. He is with OBRA the Oregon bicycle race assoc. We wave at each other and I don't think about it again for a while. About 20 minutes later I'm riding along fairly quickly in my aero position and almost run over a few Wild Turkeys!! I'm blaming this on my buddy Brian as he constantly has wild turkey encounters where he rides! Brian, they have migrated south Bro!! My legs are feeling real heavy, but after making it over the first big climb of the day and heading into the turn around town to refill the bottles I was feeling good.

I'm now on my way back and climbing the same hill as before from the opposite direction. A few hundred yards from the top I see what appears to be an aid station. I pedal closer. Sure enough, there a bunch of water bottles ready to handed out and a few people to offer words of encouragement. I just get a few thumbs up and crest the hill ahead. As I'm now rolling into Marcola I'm making pretty good time. I notice a Subaru on my hip. He won't pass me even though the road is clear. He stays on my hip for about a minute and then finally pulls up next to me and says, "My leaders are about to catch you. There are two of them." I say thanks and he pulls ahead. I think to myself...ok I'm going to kick it up a notch and give these boys a target to shoot for. I start pounding out a 26mph + pace. About two minutes later I feel a train coming up on me. I can feel the two bikes coming by me and think to myself WTF?? These guys must be doing close to 35mph on flat road? I then take a look at them and notice they are on Tandems! It was some kind of tandem bike race that was going on and these two teams were destroying their field. I yelled, "great job guys!" as they rode away...probably couldn't hear as they were going so darn fast :)

The ride finished relatively uneventfully except for this guy that I passed who then decided to give it the old college try and re pass me a few minutes later. I hate this because the guy dug so deep to re pass me that now he can't stay in front of me. So after about 30 seconds of sitting on his wheel I bury him. I mean, kick it into over drive and make sure that he won't even think about trying another stunt like that for the remainder of the ride, bury him. There is a little hill about 1/2 mile after I re passed him that I attacked. I was 80 miles into the ride but just attacked this little hill. I looked back at the top and he was just starting. I guess I won my own little race yesterday :)

When I got back to the house Meg was excited to try out her new orthotics so she joined me for my transition run. Great success for her, no pain...we are keeping our fingers crossed. We had some lunch and headed out to some of the farms up the road to look at flowers, goats, and buy some veggies. That's where these pics are from. It was a great day, today promises to be much the same with a long run momentarily and a swim workout followed by lounging in the sun at home. Thanks for reading!

-T