Toasty

Thursday: 30 mile ride
Friday: 17 mile ride, 2200m swim

It's a little warm out there. And windy. Per the NCAR Weather Station, it's currently in the mid-90s, with an average wind of 9.2 mph and gusts up to 21.5 mph. Not one of my finest rides. Of course, I wasn't supposed to ride either. Today was just a swim only day, but I had a little too much energy and felt like I had to get out at lunch.

My ride on Thursday was pretty good. I was supposed to do 35 miles, with 15 in Z3. I was hoping to do the Lyons loop, which is about 33. The alarm was set for 5 and once again, I reset it as soon as it went off. I just haven't been able to get up early this week. The big problem with postponing until after work was that I had a project launch that afternoon and there's always the potential for everything to go wrong and we're all stuck working until 10pm. I also had wanted to do the Stroke and Stride, but it was clear that wasn't going to happen. I prayed for a smooth launch and went back to sleep. Fortunately the launch went really well (the smoothest ever and I had absolutely nothing to do for it). However, by the time I picked up my CSA food and took the dogs out for a very quick walk, it was almost 6. This sort of made the Lyons loop not seem so feasible. It's really hard to get those long rides in during a weekday without some additional planning ahead. Last year, I would do these rides on a dog daycare day. I'd quit work a little early and ride from work. I'd get in a few hours and then be able to pick the dogs up by 7. But again, I kind of need to plan in advance for that. So I readjusted my workout once again and decided to do St. Vrain instead. The only issue I have with this route is that there's a lot of downhill so I feel like I don't get a true Z3 workout in. But it was really my only option. And I surprised myself. My fastest riding was done after the long downhill section. Who knew? The Z3 set went pretty well considering it was getting late and I was tired. It was also really warm. It had cooled down considerably from the insanely high temperatures earlier in the day. But it was a bit muggy. And riding by the cow fields was really quite disgusting. It sort of made running by the dump on Wednesday almost pleasant in comparison. Because of the heat and little bit of humidity, when I rode by the cow fields, it was just a blast of warm, moist, manure-smelling air that just surrounded me. It actually felt like it was covering me. Like I said, really quite disgusting. I was really looking forward to the shower afterwards.

Swimming this evening went much better than Wednesday. At least 100% better. It was an opposite end of the spectrum swim. Wolfgang wasn't there and we always tend to slack a lot with substitute teachers. The workout wasn't super hard, but there were some long sets and I was able to hit all of the intervals with ease. It was a good way to finish the work week. And now it's pretty much a long taper until next weekend.