Since I got back to Houston a week ago, I have been re-immersing myself in the real day to day life of laundry, housecleaning, paying bills, caring for the animals, grocery shopping and the general hoi poloi of life in surburban Houston, I got my bike back from the bike shop with a long list of repairs and adjustments including a new head set, since the old one had rusted through, completed and took it for a short check out ride.
The route I normally take from the bike shop through George Bush Park is still flooded from the heavy rains of several weeks ago s took a shorter 10 mile route that was mostly on local residential streets. Shock number one- the Texas drivers haven't changed, and who seem even worse compared to some of the drivers in north Florida, who actually were polite, gave us time and space when passing. I got honked at several times, and no they weren't the friendly little "Hi fellow biker, cool to see you out riding" honks, these were the sudden, loud, impatient "get out my way" honks. In addition, two big white pick up trucks got close enough to side swipe me with their mirrors, and as usual, they were white ford F 150's which led me to ponder why a prepoderance of the dangerous to biker trucks in Texas seem to be F 150's?
Content with the ride and how I felt, I called my trainer and set up a workout for the next day. Shock number two, there are a lot of muscles that didn't get used much for two and half months. I woke up stiff and sore on Saturday and was glad that all I had to do was sit at spin fiber while demonstrating at the Houston Highland games. Saturday night I took a couple of advil, hoping that I could possibly sleep it off Sunday. Unfortunately, the body now wakes routinely at 6:00 a.m. and I can only seem to sleep another hour or so .
Monday a.m., since I was awake anyway, I decided to go out and do a routine training ride. I am determined to keep up the strength I gained from the long ride and build it into some sort of speed increase so I foucsed the middle half of the ride on pushing speed intervals. Shock number three, long distance riding does nothing for cardio since every speed sprint left me gasping for air, and although I recovered quickly each time, it wasn't as easy as I had hoped, nor was my overall speed as high as would seem indicated by the number and speed of the sprints I was doing.
Undeterred, I showed up for a Monday evening session with the trainer. I had deliberately keptmy ride distance in the morning at 40 miles so that I would have something left for the training session. I had eaten a good post ride recovery meal, rested and even taken a nap so I thought the workout would be relatively doable. Shock number four, relatively doable is a relative term. Yes, I got through the workout with many, many pauses to gasp and pant, and Taylor, the trainer was being relatively easy on me since he started all the weights out at about 2 levels lower than I had been doing before the ride but I knew by the end of the session that there was definitely a whole new set of muscle that hadn't gotten much use recently and that even the muscles tat were sore on Saturday hadn't fully recovered.
Today was shock number five- I think every muscle and joint is stiff and sore, I guess I'm not as young physically as I thought I was. It's going to take a while to get back into the swing of training and cross training.
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