That was rough....

 This past weekend it was fairly warm out, so I decided to load up a bike and head out to ride.  But first, lets go back a few weeks.

I started the Ride Your Way Lean program again. This type of a structured workout works very well on the trainer. In Zwift you can make custom workouts. If you follow me you probably see a RYWL Week 1 as a Strava title. This is a structured workout from the program. It was developed by Selene Yeager. There is a lot of good info in the book, but the workouts are easy to set up. And the book is written in basic English, so its easy to understand and follow.

Basically there are 3 bigger rides and a recovery ride during the week. Then the weekends are 90 minutes plus. That is why I decided to ride outside last weekend. The workouts are different types of intervals. But not the full out max intervals that will kill someone that hasn't been riding. They are basically a bump harder for a duration and then a rest. Then a regular ride in the middle with a bit harder interval set on the third. Then Friday is a 30 min spin. I wish I had done that last week because my legs paid the price on Saturday.

I am now in Week 3. I have 207 miles for December. This is fairly steep considering I have hardly any miles since June and the incident with the bike at LJ100. You can see the RYWL events that are blue and the single ride outside that is red.

And about that outside ride. I geared up and headed out. Temps were not bad but the wind was chilly. I met Jay and his buddy Josh down at Warnaar trails at Meyer Broadway Park in Three Rivers. We headed out and I figured out fairly quickly that I wasn't going to have a good day. My legs felt like concrete. I was just trying to spin and ramp up the hills. With the guys right behind me I felt terrible for barely getting to the top of a climb. Then I shifted and the chain over-ran the stop and popped off, jamming into the wheel. Fought that off and continued on. Then it happened again a mile or so later. At this point I was very frustrated with how I was feeling and how the bike was working. Both my own fault. I told the guys to go ahead, but they were willing to hang out and ride with me still.

 We forged ahead and the trail got super soft. There are some new areas that I wasn't aware of and they were super soggy. The tick in warmer temps must have pushed the water to the surface. This limited my day to a single lap, which was fine. Thankfully we were on Fat bikes and not doing any cookie cutter lines, but it was too wet for us to be out there. Had we known we would have passed.

Still, I got out and rode. It was a bit rough with the fatbike at Warnaar, but I survived. Was awesome to see Jay and catch up with him for a while. While I know my attitude wasn't the best I was still doing what I could. What I could do was better than sitting on the couch.

Work stress has been growing and I think that came to a head on this ride. Need to continue to develop that mental awareness. I know it now, but didn't really know it was bothering as me much on that day. So I learn, I grow, I move forward. 

Back on Whole30 again to restart the system before Hawaii. OH that's right, Christine and I got to Hawaii in January. There are some major things there that I plan to do and I will surely post pics and videos about it all.

Until then.....stay warm....stay safe....and as always....keep moving forward.