Three 40+ Mile Rides in One Week!

Last week was another big bike week!! I posted a few weeks back about a week of 121 miles in the saddle which was great, but last week, I hit 130+ miles!

130.9 miles on my bike!

We were in Alexandria MN with my family, and therefore I skipped my Tuesday swim and biked instead. And I also had more time (as we were on vacation), so I could bike for longer. In fact, I was back home on my bike before everyone was up on those 3 days. Most of my family was still passed out each time I got back, so I wasn't missing out on family time either.

• TUESDAY was a long ride with the first 35 at tempo pace. That's a long tempo ride. And it wasn't SUPER hard because I was going so far. It was like a 90% tempo effort and not like a 98% effort. It was also just over 60 degrees when I took off before sunrise, so I was wearing LONG SLEEVES for the first time in months:

Long sleeves under my jersey.


Long boring trail. Actually mentally hard to do a long ride because it's soooo boring.


Pretty colors as the sun rises.


Three deer butts! I scared some deer on the way back. Saw a total of 8 deer on this ride.


From Alex to Garfield to Brandon to Evansville to Melby
and back (with some extra around Alex as a cooldown).


Kinda downhill on the way out.

Notice there's not a big drop in speed at mile 35 (when I stopped biking hard) because I was with the wind at that point. The most noticeable part of my speed graph is speeding up with the wind at my turn-around at mile 20.7. It was NOT a fast ride: I was at 18.7 mph at mile 15 before deciding to work a little harder, got it up to 19.2 mph at the turnaround, and then hit 20.0 mph before the end of my tempo effort at mile 35.

• THURSDAY was 4x5 mile efforts. This was to be my "hard" ride! I got a photo of my bike with Big Ole during my warm-up:

Big Ole might have a new hair color soon!

There wasn't much wind, so my intervals were pretty consistent. Here's what they looked like (also noting my average speed half way through):

#1: 13:50, 21.7 mph (21.8 mph half way, just down from 22.0 before that)

#2: 13:27, 22.3 mph (22.5 half way)

#3: 13:23, 22.4 mph (23.7 half way)

#4: 13:16, 22.6 mph (22.9 half way)

I worked hard to descend those! The lowest part of each interval was in the middle, so I had a small, uphill "false flat" to the finish of all 4 intervals:

The "dips" in elevation were the middle of each of the intervals.
(Note how the dips fit together in the middle of the faster paces for the intervals.)


Intervals between the 3 and 6 on that map. Cooldown to the east.

Also note that I got in a few miles that afternoon while biking with Charlie to one of the culverts that goes under the trail. He caught a bass right off the trail:

Literally standing on the bike trail to get this photo!

• SATURDAY was just a moderate ride. Nothing fancy! I had jsut done a hard run the day before, so I didn't want to hurt myself. I also took off on this ride REALLY EARLY, so it was quite dark on the road to get to the bike trail:

Something like 30-40 minutes before sunrise. The days are getting shorter!!


The phone makes the trail look brighter, but the "speed blur" lets you know it was darker!


The sun was finally up on my way back! Long shadow selfie with corn.


Out-and-back for 30 miles, but then extra on the highway around Alex...


... I have to keep some of these roads in mind for the future!

Some parts of the trail are getting pretty rough, so more time on nice highways might be more of my jam in the future.

I don't think I've EVER had 3 rides all over 40 miles in a week before!! And Thursday and Saturday from the week before both had 33+ mile rides, so I logged 199.25 miles in 10 days!!