Worn plumb out

Been busy on the bike the last few days. On Thursday I did what are called VO2's with Matt, Jason, and Don, something that Matt does every couple of weeks and are quite painful. Essentially, we do about 40 minutes of warmup at 23-24 mph (which is a workout in-and-of itself) and that's normal for those three thunderbolts. Then you follow that up with six 3-minute near-max efforts with 3 minutes of rest in between. The fifth effort, however, has to be beyond max and you should feel like "hurling chunks" when it's done. Then you have about 40 minutes of cool-down at around 17-18 mph. So, yeah, I did it and I did feel like "blowing chow" after the fifth rep. But I could see how this would improve my time trialing and maintaining a sustained effort if I keep this up at least once every couple of weeks. The whole workout covered almost 40 miles.

Then today I had to get in a long ride so I could continue trying to get back into shape after all that sickness a few weeks back (I still can't breathe as deeply as I need to). I managed to scrape out 67 miles with the first 40 being pretty hard and the last 27 being pretty weak (still averaged 19.8 mph for the whole distance and I'll take that for now). Got home totally wasted and had to force myself to put up the bike gear, shower, and get some things in order. Then I collapsed on the bed and snoozed for over an hour! What woke me up was the intense need to eat and I finished off what was left of my Chinese food that we had ordered last night. General Tso's Chicken is what I usually get and, yessir, dem boys is tasty.

(Now whether this means I do the stage race in Alexandria this weekend is suspect. I have until Thursday night to make up my mind if I want to have myself publicly destroyed during that time!)

I spent the rest of the afternoon visiting one of the local bike shops and then tried to finish up the medicine cabinet for the guest bathroom. The cabinet's installed in the wall now and ll I need is to get shorter screws for the door handle and some wood screws to anchor the cabinet into the wall. Then we're done with that!

Jonnene is working this weekend but she got off early enough today to take part in an open water swim class. She didn't get home until a bit after 4 pm but apparently got a good workout in the lake with about 32 other participants.

We rented "Kung Fu Panda" last night (hence the Chinese food order) and really enjoyed it. The computer animation on these films is really getting good and I was blown away by things like low-lit water in a night scene being reflected on the characters, or how a character would become brighter as he approached a light. Very well done.