Looking forward to a hard weekend

Just finished a good ride on the trainer.  Spinervals 43.0 - Aerobic Engine Builder.  I looked at my past results on Garmin Connect, and it looks like I've only ever done this workout once before.  I think I may have tried it one or two other times, but have been cut short.  Last time I did the complete workout was in February.  Comparing the two results, today I did one more mile than I did in February, in the same amount of time.  My average speed was 16.9 mph today, compared to 16.5 mph in February.  I think that's a great sign of progress.  So, I'm pretty pleased right now.

Tomorrow, the kids have swim lessons, and then my daughter has a birthday party to go to.  After that, I'm going to try to knock out a 10k run.  Not sure if I'm going to do any riding tomorrow.  But on Sunday, I have a big plan for riding.  Well, riding on the trainer.  Since I'm still staying off the road as I nurse my arm back to health, but I need to get in some training for the Triple Bypass, I'm going to try to ride an indoor century.  For my video-of-the-month from Spinervals.com, I picked Spinervals 26.0 - The Hardcore 100, a 5 1/2-hour set of 3 videos.  If ridden at an average speed of about 18 mph, it should end up being about a 100-mile ride.  I'm interested to see how I do.  I don't want to waste all of Fathers Day in the garage, so I plan to get up super-early to start riding.

As you have seen on earlier blog posts, I post all my activities to Strava, as well as to Garmin Connect.  I like them both, but I show my ride data on this blog using Garmin Connect, just because they have a better embedded widget to show the data.  But I really love Strava, too.  One thing Strava does is monthly challenges where you can run or ride to try to meet some goal, or compare your results to other participants around the world.  For example, every month they have a mileage challenge, which is pretty straightforward:  Ride as many miles as you can.  Sometimes they have challenges that are tied in some way to major professional races that are going on at the time.  With my busted arm, I was out-of-luck for the cycling challenges for May and June.  So, I signed up for the running challenges instead.

Currently, I am signed up for the Any Way 10k, which challenges you to run 10k on June 15 or 16.  Hence my plan to run a 10k tomorrow afternoon.  I actually did this last weekend, because I thought you had to do it any time in June.  I didn't realize it was limited to just this weekend.  So, last weekend was practice.  Tomorrow is for real.

I also just signed up for two cycling challenges in July:

• Powerbar Take on the Tour:  This challenges you to ride half the distance of the Tour de France (1,680 kilometers) from June 29 (start of Le Tour) to July 31 (10 days after the Tour ends).  We'll see how I do.  I'll put in a lot of miles on the Triple Bypass, but we'll have to see how much my arm hurts afterwards.
• Rapha Rising: La Centième: This challenge is to climb the combined elevation gain of the major climbs in this years Tour de France, for a grand total of 7,235m from July 14-21.  Unfortunately, this challenge starts the day AFTER the Triple Bypass, so my 10,000 feet of elevation on Saturday won't count, since the challenge starts on Sunday.  Ugh.

Food:

• Breakfast:  Fruit / protein smoothie
• Lunch:  Kind of a weird day.  Had some meetings in Estes Park, then just came home instead of going back to work.  Had a late lunch at Chipotle on my drive home.  Steak fajita burrito.  But I made up for it . . . 
• Dinner:  Just a protein bar.  Was still full from my lunch burrito.

Exercise:

• 2 hours on the trainer.  Spinervals 43.0 - Aerobic Engine Builder.  I like this one.  It's pretty simple, but is a great workout and burns a ton of calories.  10x2 minutes, high resistance, low cadence.  4x5 minutes, high resistance, low cadence.  10x2 minutes, low resistance, high cadence.  5x4 minutes, low resistance, high cadence.  Trying to keep the heard rate in Zone 3 the whole time.  I spent more time in high-Zone 2 instead of Zone 3, but spend a fair bit of time in Zone 3 as well.  This is more of a muscular endurance workout than some of the aerobic endurance workouts I usually do.  Pushing a lot more power today than usual.

Today's weigh-in: 175.2