Pedaling Squares

Spent the last week with my cycling/coaching group, Vision Quest Coaching Service.

I was affiliated with them from 2003-2004, until I had the smackdown by a car. I am "gently" easing back into it, and of course, the week I decided to make it official, they do all of the base fitness testing, ie: Hell Week.

Tuesday was 40 minutes of lactate threshold, indoors on a stationary compu-trainer. This determines a power number in watts, that you can hold for a specific period of time. Thursday was VO2 max. testing. How hard can you go, all out for 4 minutes on a compu-trainer, and see what that wattage number is as well. This is followed by 2 maximum sprint efforts for 10 seconds each, to see what the maximum amount of power you can put out.

All was well, until yesterday. This was the last of the testing. 4 hours of pain. Ride for 4 hours, to determine what amount of power you can put out, average over a 4 hour period. This translates into about 75 miles worth of riding, outdoors. For some reason, it was about 92 degrees outside in the last hour and a half, and it was miserable. I have not ridden over 60 miles at one time since before my accident, so 75 miles in the heat, wind etc. was brutal. Heck, they even cancelled the Chicago Marathon because of the heat, and it was a couple of degrees cooler up there!













Here's Coach Stan-O-Leenie giving pre-ride instructions to the group.

Classic shot of Ethan, aka "The Young One"

Here's the group, pre ride: The Young One, Little Mikey, Coach Stan-O, Rob, Steve Evans aka: The Judge, Dr. Reid, The Badger & Myself, The Turtle









Here's the aftermath, over 4 hours of riding later. We all joked, told lies about how we could have gone harder if we wanted to blah, blah, blah.

It was a great day for all of us. I would not want to do it again anytime soon, as when the 3 hour mark hit, I fell apart. Not imploded, but pretty close. I guess you could say that I was pedaling squares the last hour or so.