Tonight I went for a 2 hour and 5 minute ride. Last week I really only did one ride, a speed work session, and I had to miss my long 6 hour Saturday ride due to rain. I was a little concerned if I had lost my cycling strength because I missed the long ride, which would be a bad thing, as I'm getting so close to racing in the Ironman.
The first hour of the ride I was disappointed. I was only averaging 28.4 kph, which is much slower than I'm used to. Every ride, my goal is to be at least 30 kph. During this ride it just seemed that I couldn't get momentum. At the 30 minute point, my time was even worse, it was in the 26 kph range, it was very disheartening.
At the 1 hour point, I started turning from the head wind and going into a cross wind. I find I can cycle pretty strong regardless if there is a cross wind or not. The only thing that slows me up is a head wind. Plus, the route I took, the first hour was a head wind and a lot of hill climbing and a road closure that I had to walk my bike around. As I made the turn I started to feel better. It was nice to see the speedometer start to hit 36 - 44 kph. For the next 65 minutes I started to go much faster. My goal was to keep my heart rate under 134 bpm, so I didn't want to go too hard.
I ended up doing 66.5 km and I ended up averaging 31.9 kph for the entire ride. That means I ended up averaging 35.4 kph for the last 65 minutes. I was really happy about that, it helped my confidence on the bike. Afterwards I felt really strong, I'm sure I could easily have maintained that pace for another hour or two, maybe longer.
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