Two things before we recap today’s ride:
- I’ve started doing Pilates, with the aim of finally addressing some of the muscle imbalances that cause me pain in the second half of Chain Reaction, and that almost certainly are holding me back performance wise. It’s both frustrating (tiny movements through tiny ROMs that are, nevertheless, wickedly hard), and illuminating. I have all kinds of messy recruitment patterns, and the glute strength of a teenage girl (apparently).
- I’ve been commuting 2-3 times a week, all CX. It’s fun, it’s a great mental break between home and work, and, most days, it’s easy to hit the hills and single track hard — which transfers well to road riding.
Ok, so, that’s what’s been going on. This was supposed to be just a gentle Sunday roll with DC on his return from Bali, but we wound up hitting some decent climbs, and doing some respectable times up them. In my first road ride in a while, I was pleasantly surprised at how some of the climbs I usually think of as ‘always tough’ were now ‘discretionarily tough’; meaning I could set my own pace and push as much as I wanted.
There was a little half-wheeling, and though I’m not going to pretend DC couldn’t have dropped me at will, I wasn’t shooting out the back like usual either.
The final sweetener was coming home and finding I’d set a PR on my favourite benchmark: the full Antoinette/Mt Pleasant TT, which I’d done as a sneaky extra loop before meeting Dave.
69km 2:52hrs 1,430m
https://www.strava.com/activities/410384787
