I don't know what it is with my feet lately. For the past few weeks the ball of my left foot has been sore and I'm going to have a Podiatrist look at it tomorrow. On the phone he told me I should take a couple of weeks off and I told him "that's not going to happen". Then this morning I stepped on my toe with the same foot. Yes the same foot. Somehow my toe crunched under and I stepped on it and no I don't have a really long toe. It felt like I had severely stubbed it or broken it. At lunch time I went to the Y to do weights and when I pulled my runners out of my gym bag I had two different runners, different colors and both were for the left foot. I had a decision to make. Do I train later tonight after I go home and get new shoes or do I put on two left shoes and train now? I decided to train with the two left shoes.
At first I thought I'd be embarrassed if someone looked at my two left feet, but realized this is Toronto and very few people even make eye contact, so chances are no one will even notice my shoes. The bigger problems was that because I hurt my right toe and was wearing a left shoe, it was putting incredible pressure on the injured toe and it was hurting bad. I tried to do lunges and when I pulled me right foot back I almost jumped out of my skin due to the pain. I was only able to do lunges on the other side. But I finished and no one saw I was wearing two different left footed shoes. Today I also hit a milestone. In 612 days, I have now burnt over 900,000 calories over 951 workouts.
After dinner I did my last tempo bike ride before I start my speed work next week. I was a little concerned if I was going to be able to ride with my injured toe but it turned out I could, it just throbbed a little. I had a strong ride, for the first half I was going directly into a head wind and keeping it over 30 kph. At the beginning I didn't feel the soreness on the ball of my left foot because my right toe was throbbing. Then it would switch and I could feel soreness on the ball of my left foot and it would take the focus of pain off my right toe. Then I decided to do hills and my quads hurt so much I couldn't feel either foot and then when I was heading back with the wind at my back my hamstrings were getting sore and I didn't feel the pain in either foot or my quads. And finally, when I was going down my last hill and I didn't have any pain in either foot or my quads or my hamstrings and at 63 kph a bug hit me and got stuck in my eye. I couldn't get it out until I slowed down at the bottom.
I did some research on how to get good at climbing hills and I found out the secret. It was in every article I read. Sure they all said to relax, to breath consistently, to pull your foot up on the upstroke, to spin, and to have a positive attitude, but those tips were not the secret. The secret to getting good at riding hills was "to ride hills a lot"!!!
So tonight I decided to do Spring Ridge hill which takes about 4 -5 minutes to get up. When I got to the top I was so tired and I was glad it was the turnaround point to go home but I decided to extend the ride and go down and up the killer Number 14 side road hill. The reason I did it was because I didn't want to do it. It was a test to see if I really wanted to get better at hill climbing. That took another 5 - 6 minutes. My legs were screaming riding up the hills and after 44 minutes of riding I was only averaging 25 kph because of the hills. On the way back, which took only 20 minutes, I had the wind at my back and rode close to 40 kph the entire way and only got chased by one dog and he didn't have a chance of catching me. I ended up getting home with a 29.8 kph average. It may not seem like a fast time but without the hills I would have averaged at least 33 kph.
The one great thing on this ride was the timing of the music on my iPhone. Going down Spring Ridge hill at 70 + kph the song from Green Day "time of your life" came on and it seared that downhill into my memory. Then as I was flying on the flats at 47 kph with the wind at my back the song from Louis Armstrong "what a wonderful world" came on and I had another memory searing moment. That's the definition of "Life's simple pleasures".
Tempo Bike - 1:08:24 / 33.98 km / 29.8 kph
(Ate healthy yesterday)
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