I was under dressed

Steady on there! Not trying to get anyone all worked up. (Yeah, in my dreams.) I was a bit of a slacker this morning, out of bed at 7, and then hanging around, reading and napping in my chair till about noon. My hips were really stiff at the start of that, and when I finally got my lazy ass moving, it was my knees that were feeling sort of wonky.

After a bit of limbering up I started on the bike nice and easy. It took a little while to settle in. Most of it was easy spin, mainly working on getting my blood flowing and concentrating on different aspects of the spin. At one point I was scraping the mud, another was pulling up. The weird one was doing one leg spin with both legs on the pedals. It's a mental trick. One leg is doing the work while the other is along for the ride. It feels like one of the cranks is longer than the other.

After 45 minutes I was feeling warmed up, sweating lightly, but not soaking wet. I dried off, put on tights, long sleeved tech shirt, jacket, and at the last minute added toque and gloves. At first my legs felt pretty good, and I moved along at a good pace. I was going north towards the reservoir and at first there was no wind. The closer I got the more I could feel it picking up. That's nice until the time comes to turn around. My run went to shite shortly after that.

My legs had felt springy and light, and quickly seemed to turn heavy and slow. My knees stiffened up and I was getting some odd niggles I've never had before. Normally if I get muscle aches in my calves it's just where the muscle starts to get big, looking from bottom to top. But today it was just below my knees, and even in my hams just above the knees. There was an odd feeling on the outside of both knees that was new that I didn't like very much. Very strange for me. I even stopped and stretched a couple times.

It turned into a bit of a run walk to get home, as the wind got stronger and stronger. There was a tiny bit of hail. Toward the end I was distinctly cold, and even took a bit of a different route through the neighbourhood to get out of the wind sooner. My knees themselves didn't feel cold, but everything around them did, and only slowly warmed up in the shower. A nice bowl of soup helped too.

So a 45 minute easy spin bike, and an hour run. I can still feel it in my legs. This after a rest day yesterday. I'll go stretch more.

There were a few people out on their road bikes, dressed to the nines. It's still way to cold for me to get outside on the bike. I'm a weenie like that. Plus there is still all kinds of crap on the roadside. I can't wait to get outside and see where my bike fitness really is. Inside it's feeling strong, and the watt numbers are getting bigger, but who knows how that will translate to actual speed on the road?

I was thinking of signing up for the 70.3 since I'm going to be awake for it. I really must get my races sorted out this year. Some people are racing people; they are out almost every weekend racing. For me races are a bit of a pain in the schedule. Its a lot of work getting myself and all the gear to the race and set up, going through the whole day, and cleaning up after. If there is travel involved, that makes it even harder. I'm finding more and more that my right knee does not like long car trips. On the other hand, I really like getting outside and doing the activities. Maybe I'm a training person at heart.

How about you? Are you a racing person, or a training person?