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Early morning summer rides in rural Oregon are very beautiful! A nice cool breeze blowing bringing with it the aroma of freshly plowed farmland as I ride through the country side thinking of the coming days events. Today is especially exciting as my daughter is coming to visit! I haven’t seen her in quite some time… I feel like a kid at Christmas. I have the day off today so that I can spend some time with her and her little family. I have few memories of her, just photographs of events I had no part in. I pray that today will be the start of happier times between us. I wanted to put in a 40 mile ride today, but time got the best of me. I rode just shy of 30. Good enough to calm me down. I also think that I took a little extra time to get ready so that I could be on the road heading home as she she drove up. That plan worked! Her name is Kimberly, goes by Kim, a very beautiful young woman she has grown into! And I care very deeply for her and pray that she will know of this from me. Today we went to the Evergreen Aerospace Museum in McMinnville were the Spruce Goose is now residing, still a very impressive airplane 60 some years after it was built!
Visit with Kim Deciding what to do for a training session, sometimes it’s as easy as not riding and rest, other times I do intervals, and like tonight decide to spin. Podcasts from PodRunner really make it easy to just zone out and pedal. Picking arrangements that fall within my natural cadence of 75 – 80 rpm encourange me to just keep pedaling and not get tired. I’ve have several PodRunner podcasts in the 150-160 bpm range (75-80 rpm) and really enjoy the latest one called “Chants Meeting” 149 bpm, 75 rpm. The goal tonight was to keep the cadence over the 75 rpm of the podcast (actually spinning over 78 rpms and not slowing down below 75 rpms). In doing so, my heart rate is also kept in a reasonable range, staying “aerobic” 70% of the time.
The hardest part of training is seeing the results. Always riding on the trainer, be it spinning, intervals, or resistance, I never really see the gains I hope for. This is where taking time away from riding really helps. It allows for the body to rebuild after a hard session, and, become stronger for the next. Looking over my training logs, last year the total number of hours ridden at 175 days was 98:23 hours with 28:45 hours ridden in my max zone. In other words 29% of the time I was riding pretty hard. This year at 174 days, I have ridden 130:18 hours with 17:26 ridden in my max zone. Riding in my maz zone only 13% of the time you might think I was riding slower this year, I thought so too. I compared my averages from last year to this and I’m actually faster this year! My average so far is 18.8 mph versus last year’s 18.7 mph, I must be doing something right! Rode to podcast from PodRunner called “Transit Authority”, 159 bpm, 79 rpm, worked on intervals. 
After a long ride and a day off from riding, I find it helpful to loosen up by spinning. 
As of Saturday, I have over 2300 miles ridden for the year! 20 days and counting before the STP, I’m feeling pretty good about this year’s ride, considering I’m still on chemo, and will be riding the “Q”. Last year I made it to 2000 miles the week of the STP, and it was my fastest 200 miles to date (it didn’t hurt that we had a tail wind most of the ride!) As I’ve mentioned before, the more I ride the “Q”, the stronger I am with it. 
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