4AM1 : SLB2

That was the score for this weeks training sessions. Tuesday and Friday the alarm had woken me with a start at 4am and had been up at ‘em before you could say "WTF is the time"! It had also been a week of swaps, Tuesdays 14 mile ride was swapped with Thursday 12 and was then carried over till Friday morning and ended up being 16 miles, then Friday afternoon I ran 10 miles at an average pace of 8:14, so the likelihood that I was going leap out of bed Saturday morning at 4am was slim to none and none won! And so at 6:20am, nearly two hours later then planned, I was finally on the road.

The sun was up and the clouds were all pinks and oranges. This was to be the last long ride and I was aiming for 90 miles, it was actually scheduled for next weekend but I have a race so it was another swap. After last week’s mountain ride this week I had planned, using GMaps Pedometer, what seemed a flatter route half of which was all new, a change being as good as a rest afterall, so with some mental juggling I decided to ride he new route, originally as a loop, backwards, see how far I could get in 2:30 hours (I had a total of 5:40 hours to play with instead of my original 7:00 and had to be home by noon) and turn around or if over halfway push through for the loop.

The route took me North through Thousand Oaks and into the Conejo Valley of which the flat central plain is a major farming area; I rode by miles of lemon and orange groves and other unidentifiable growing things! Well it wasn’t quite as flat as I thought and 2:30 later I had 38 miles done, average just over 15mph. So I about faced and headed home, strangely it took roughly to same time to come home even though it seemed to be more uphill and so I tooled around for another 40 minutes to push up the mileage arriving home just gone midday.

To be honest I was feeling it at this point and while I could have probably slogged out the last fifteen miles had I had the time my legs were tired and I was starting to feel a niggle in my calf that had appeared in the previous nights run so I was happy to call it then.

So the final stats 75.82 miles, 5:12 moving time and 5:41 total time, (this makes total sense as coming back through Thousand Oaks I hit nearly every red light I could find, I gave up counting at 23 in the space of five miles!) and just over 7000’ of elevation; so much for a flat route.

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