I do enjoy a little suffering in my training a few wet, cold windy days during the winter out on the bike or run. It gives you this great sense of accomplishment surviving a long day in the crud and let's face it there are few things better than a hot shower after a long cold day. At a certain point in the spring it's time for the clouds to part, the sun shine down and to be able to begin to worry about getting too warm instead of getting hypothermic.
I've now officially had it with the weather. It's mid April and the forecast for the weekend is snow here in Seattle, enough is enough. I'd go back to Hood River this weekend but the forecast is no better there. My only hope is that it stays dry for my long ride on Sunday. To give you an idea how bad it is we're 10-12 degrees below our average this time of year every day and I did my first open water swim last year on April 21st (yeah it was refreshingly cool but it was above 50 degrees), at this rate I won't be in the lake until the end of May.
I headed south to Hood River, Oregon last weekend as the forecast was for warmer temps, it was forecasted to be nice in Seattle but frankly I don't trust the weather here this year, so I went for the sure thing.
Saturday I did a 5 hour ride heading out with just knee warmers and arm warmers and sans gloves at 8am. There was a lot climbing in the first hour, followed by a mind bending switchback laden 5 mile descent to The Dalles at over 31 mph avg and a max of 49 mph. After a casual cruise through The Dalles I did my 20 mile hard effort on fifteen mile road. It's a surreal ride the road seriously looks like it's going downhill at a 2-3% grade but is in fact an uphill grade where you're lucky to top 18 mph with the pedal down. After 10 miles you hit the turnaround and then the fun begins with averages above 25 mph back to town. Back through The Dalles and on to Rowena where I did three intervals up and down the climb to Rowena Butte. It's 2.2 miles of perfectly even 7.5% grade and I love this climb, I got progressively faster each interval by 10-15 seconds which is great at the 75 mile mark of the ride. Next I rode back to Mosier, there is a lot of slightly downhill riding in this section but this was the first time I've ridden this ride without fighting the famous gorge winds, normally I'm lucky to average 15 or 16 mph working my ass off but today there was no wind and got to enjoy the 8 miles ride at a 25 mph average. My final few miles I did the easy spin back to Hood River. The temps topped out in the low 80's which was heaven.
Sunday I did a very comfortable 90 minute run on the twin tunnel trail and actually ran negative splits. It was great running comfortably for 90 minutes at 7:30/mile pace and I feel like my run form is finally returning after being absent for several years.
This weekend I'm expecting a tough couple days with the weather and next weekend I'm supposed to be in Coeur d'Alene for my long training weekend but I'm just hoping that it warms up or it's going to be a miserable couple of long days.
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