Hitting a milestone in the rain...

All week they predicted rain for today and they were right. Mark Rutledge had a long ride planned, rain or shine, and I decided to join him. He's training for Ironman Canada this year, he also raced last weekend at Muskoka. Mark is in my 40-44 age group and we were talking about how fast the winners in our group are. It is unbelievable, some are professional calibre and are beating some of the pro's who are 20 years younger.

I hate wet feet when I ride, so before I left the house at 8 am after only 6 hours of sleep, I taped plastic bags over my socks before I put my shoes on. They worked like a charm for about 2.5 hours, my feet stayed dry. 

It was a nice easy, casual ride and Mark and I chatted the entire time. For over half the ride it was raining fairly steady. The one good thing about riding with someone else is that the time goes by so much faster. We were 3 hours into the ride and to me it felt like we were only out for 1.5 hours. We went fairly slow and I didn't mind, I could still feel my left quad soreness from last weekends race. I couldn't have went much faster if I wanted to, my heart rate was good and low, but my legs just had no strength.

I made a point of going down some steep hills, I needed to get my mojo back. My top speed got to 69 kph in the rain and I had no speed wobble. I practice my speed wobble prevention technique and Mark even went by me on the inside on one of the downhills which startled me a little but I kept everything under control. 

When I got home I was soaked and my hands looked like they had been in a pool for 4 hours and were very wrinkly. Physically I felt fine, legs didn't feel bad at all. If felt like I only did a 2 hour ride max. After a good stretching session I dried off the bike, cleaned and re-lubed the chain. I must like this bike because I've never done that for any of my other bikes. Normally I'd let them drip dry and accept the rust on the chain.

Today was a milestone. I surpassed the 20,000 km mark of total training mileage. In 659 days, I've done 1027 workouts, which totaled 20,117 kms (12,472 miles) of training. 

Long Bike - 4:05:31 / 112.5 km / 27.5 kph / 123 avg hr

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Also, Reid finished his latest video, attached below. As you can see, I got the video camera fixed the same day. Panasonic was great to deal with and they replaced the entire lens compartment.