The sweet spot

We didn't get that much snow delivered to hour home, maybe a few cm at most, but some parts of town got much more. My co-worker measured more than a foot in her driveway. A heavy, wet foot. She stayed home. It wasn't that cold, but there was a lot of snow coming down. It was slowly melting. Running would have been an exercise in wet and heavy, and hoping you wouldn't get hit by a car.

Instead of running outside, I did a hard deep water run for an hour. Nothing more to say about that. Oh, warmed up by swimming 10 minutes. Not fast, but working on really powering through the flip turns.

The bike this evening was weirdly good. Or goodly weird. Warmup was going a bit slow. I could smell the Indian take out we'd brought home. My legs flat out didn't want to go above 110. Standing was better than the other day, but it would have been a struggle to stay with it. My legs didn't want to do any big gear work at all either.

So what did they want to do? Spin at 90 in time trial gear. Part of the first set was to do just that for 5 minutes, then do something else. When I looked at my watch 8 minutes had passed. My breathing was easy, and my heart rate was astonishing. I even sat up to adjust the band. I tried a bit more spin and big gear stuff, and it was no better. So back to TT gear at 90. My legs were happy there. I didn't have to force anything or particularly work at it to stay between 89 and 91. My heart rate settled in at 128 to 130 bpm which is excellent for me doing this. Normally it's 132 to 133 bpm by the time I finish such a set. Did that for 10 minutes and took a break that included a bit of spin up. That went a bit better not worth talking about. Then another 10 minutes of TT, feeling just as good. Sweating a bucket, but breathing easy, and a nice steady heart rate. Nice cool down, with some spin ups to 110. Anything over that was work and getting into jiggly muscles that didn't feel good. 1.25 hours of good solid strong bike, even if I couldn't spin, or push big gears. I'll take it.