Tomorrow...

As little Orphan Annie has always sung, "The sun'll come out Tomorrow So ya gotta hang on 'Til tomorrow Come what may Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya Tomorrow! You're always A day A way" It has always helped me to look forward when things look a little gray. I have a lot to look forward to starting this weekend.

• Inventory at the store will finally be done. Snow has canceled it not once but two times already. It is going to feel real good to get it over with.
• The Winter Olympics have started. I always look forward to the Olympics as I tend to find a never ending array of motivation in the stories of the athletes. Which is what the Olympic spirit is supposed to entail.
• The snowy white stuff looks to be gone for a least a week once a small storm comes through an Monday. The temps are due to be in the mid to upper 40's the entire week and it looks like it will be sunny to boot.
  

The one thing I am not looking forward to is spending a week home alone while Jenn is away at her annual conference. Which is why no matter what day it is or how good the weather is, if asked I will say I am looking forward to Friday! Until then, I am going to try and get some two-a-days on the rollers at least a couple of times this week. The hardest question while doing them will be whether or not to follow along with a Spinerval or the Olympics. Why is life so full of difficult questions?

Got one over on ...

Since moving away from Chi-town as a kid we haven't really had more than one or two of what I would consider to be "winters". This year I had a plan though. I thought that maybe just maybe if I were to leave all of the Christmas decorations and lights up around the outside of the house, good ole Mother Nature would get confused as to what time of the year it actually is and bring us some of the powdery white stuff. I think it may have worked as the last two weekends (including this one) we have been dumped on with a little wintry mix thrown in in the middle of the week just for kicks.

This storm had Jenn going in to work snow duty once again last night. Not wanting to be overly bored with her not around, I decided I would take a stab at riding the rollers two nights in a row. Both nights, I followed along with Spinervals Vol 7 The Uphill Grind. A 45 minute interval set designed to put your heart into your throat.

I have been fighting a on again off again head cold for the past couple of months as if it were a crazy ex-girlfriend who would not leave me alone despite me moving on. And in true crazy ex form, once she found out she could no longer get to me, she went after my wife. Jenn is not happy to have caught one of my colds again because they always hit her harder than me. Last night I decided to wear the heart rate strap while on the rollers for the first time this year. In the 45 minutes my heart rate averaged 164 and I saw a maximum rate of 193. I am not sure if it is a good thing or a bad thing to be able to get my rate up that high. I am not sure I have ever gotten it that high before. Does this mean my heart is getting bigger and stronger or the opposite? The exciting news for me though was despite my breathing being a bit out of control, the lactic acid in my legs was borderline ridiculous but bearable for at least 4 seconds more.

Tonight, looks to be a wash as I will probably be conducting inventory at the shop and then tomorrow I will be back at work and then home to catch some of the Super Bowl.

Roller time ...

The other day I received a message from the master of spin, Nate which had a link to what I call "the Facebook of workouts". The message said he was going to start using it as a way to track his workouts this year and hopefully it would also serve as a tool to keep him motivated. After checking it out, I too created an account and I have to say it has so far ignited the smelly gas under my ass.

So far I have been able to log two workouts since I created the account on Saturday. The first was from a partial commute to work on Sunday morning. I got about 6 miles into the ride when the 8 degree wind chill factor took its toll on the La Raza. My thinking was the spicy factor of the Salsa would keep both me and the bike warm enough to not freeze but it wasn't the case. On the one bigger climb on Courthouse Rd the rear derailleur cable froze up which left me with the choice of using either the 11 or 12 tooth cog. After a failed attempt to free it on the side of the road, I made the executive decision to ride the final two miles to my parents house and hijack a ride the rest of the way. After seeing the pawl break in Jenn's shifter I didn't want to risk it to mine. Live to ride another day!

After taking Monday night off, Jenn and I decided to pull out the trainer and rollers from under the bed. With nothing on the some 400 channels of television, we dusted off our at home version of Coach Troy volume 5.o. As Jenn said on her dailymile page, "It's one of those things that is really hard and you hate almost every second of it while you are doing it but afterwards you feel great!" With any at home training aid, you get out what you put in. I put everything in and got a great nights sleep, certainly one of the best nights I have had in a long time.

And what post would be complete without a pic of the gorgeous Mozzarella covered chicken and pasta Jenn had enough energy to cook after our workout? Yum!

What's that smell?

So I pussed out on another ride outdoors last night. Was planning on getting in about an hour's worth of easy spinning with the TNT crew but with the temperature quickly dropping we decided to cancel the ride. Jenn and I did pick up a trainer for her to use here at the house on the cold nights and days when we don't want to be outdoors. In the process I also picked up a copy of the Spinerval's 5.0 Mental Toughness.

This episode is geared towards developing the mental toughness to maintain a steady hard effort over a period of time. The video is about 1.5 hours long and uses sets of steady state intervals the entire time. It started out fairly easy and I was just spinning along on the rollers. Then I started to sweat.

The problem wasn't that I was starting to sweat but I wasn't wearing a shirt and my armpits were starting to reek. I had a running dialouge in my head on which smelled worse, the dead fish from Saturday's ride or me. That is were the "mental toughness" training began. The intervals began to get longer and longer and I began to stink more and more. It was now mentally tough to just breath the stench. Then the jerk "Coach Troy" of the video asked us to get off our bikes and do isometric squats for a minute and a half. This required us to squat to a sitting position and put our hands up behind our heads. I haven't felt that kind of burn in my legs in a long time. It f-in hurt! I was only about to hold the first one for about a minute ten. The second one I was able to fight through and hold for the entire minute and a half. Then it was back on the bike for more steady state stuff.

The workout was a good one. Not a lot of power was required from my legs but it definitely was tough at times to keep the cadence soooo high and not slowing down because I felt that my heart was beating too rapidly. Might do the same workout Thursday night since it will be colder then than last night. But for now, I am off to take another shower as I feel dirty just remembering how stank I was last night.