East Road Time Trail

The plan was to get up early and get it over with. My alarm went off at 7 but I was still tired and lacking motivation. This lack of motivation seems to happen to me when I’m coming off a few big weeks (29.5 hrs in the previous two weeks) and beginning a recovery week. I usually don’t have a lack of motivation during a big week which is good. So I shut my alarm off and reset it to eight. When it went off again, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to work up the motivation to get up and do it right then, so I went back to bed. When I finally got up I decided that I had to do something in the morning. By this point though, it was too late (too hot) to do the TT. I ended up getting a decent strength session in with a friend, which I was planning on doing that night. I went to “work” for most of the day and when I came home I still didn’t have much motivation to do the TT. Part of the reason may be because no one else was doing it with me. I dragged myself up to East Road with the plan to just see how I felt and go from there. A note on East Road, I’ve roller skied it too many times to count. It’s just an out and back for a total of 4.2 miles. I’m pretty sure I know ever bump and crack in the pavement, you get the idea. However, I have times on this TT for the last 3 years and earlier this summer so I thought it would be a good idea to do it. Anyway, I felt good doing an easy ski so I did some warm up intervals and felt good again. So I decided to do it. Thirty seconds into it I knew that my time was going to be pretty good. My legs felt great, full of pop. I looked down at my watch at the first mile, which is mostly gradual uphill- 3:58, I knew I was skiing well. When I’m skiing well I don’t dread the hills, I don’t cringe in the pain, the pain even feels different, it’s a pain that I can deal with and push through, I just think about skiing faster. I hate it when I’m not skiing well; I just want to be finished with the race, the pain hurts more, I dread the hill etc. Anyway I was flying up the hills V2ing all of them. This was pretty cool, not only because I had never done this before in this particular TT, but because I have been working on my V2 a lot this year and it felt great. I ended up doing the last mile in 3:47 and ended with a time of 17:19. Four weeks ago I did this same TT in 18:35; I was 1:16 faster! This time was also 11 seconds faster than any other time on this course. Hopefully this is a good sign that my training is working and paying off well, I don’t really know what else it would be. The rest of this week I’m going to do some easy training and take it easy before starting another big training period.