Michael: Mucho Trabajo

The chirping crickets
In the dark sleepy forest
Foreshadow peril.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Because of the topography here trying to fit in some good old fashioned LSD into a fitness regimen can be very problematic.

For example, from Volcan a 25 mile somewhat flat loop is possible, but if you want to go for a ride over 3 hours without doing loop de loops, forget it. Any direction you set off in is going to require either very long climbs or very steep climbs. In other words, as the man stopped by his coke pick up truck to make a phone call said to me as I was finishing one of the steep climbs yesterday, “Mucho trabajo”.

There are routes where you can spin at times for a good 15-30 minutes in between the near cardiac arrests inducing climbs, but you’ve just got to set your mind to it that you’re going to have to punch you’re EKG graph out of the mild zone a good 8+ times on a ride of any moderate length. That makes doing any truly “easy’ ride here not so easy.

There is one moderate long glide downhill here of 20+ miles that technically  I could spin back up that should fit into the “easy” category, but I haven’t been able to convince myself yet that  grinding up a 20+ mile hill is easy. Sure it starts out that way, but going into hour two of that spinning and my mind and legs seem to concur that somehow they’ve crossed over the easy threshold into wilting fatigue territory.

I don’t wear a heart rate monitor so I’m not sure what my cardio system has to say about this. But my woozy monitor is definitely indicating we’ve seen the last of “easy” unless we stop for a long coffee break and “easy“ takes the bus to catch up.

The rides and the roads here are great, but incorporating LSD into my riding plans definitely requires an asterisk noting that you‘re not going to get away with any lengthy ride here without a decent amount of huffing and puffing.