A Good Endurance Ride

The weather this spring has been cold and wet; not a good combination for badly needed endurance training. When it is cold out, in the 30's or 20's, I do more short intense rides such as intervals or short tempo rides. That way I stay warmer and don't feel the cold as much. But getting ready for the race season means you need to do some endurance work, in fact you need quite a bit. The heart of a cross country race is endurance.

In April the weather has been terrible and I've only had a few good endurance rides. I think of a good endurance ride as one that is more than an hour and a half in length. This weekend the weather improved with the temperature in the upper 40's Saturday and in the upper 50's today.

Saturday I managed to do an hour and forty minutes at a good pace through some hills. Then today I was able to do a two and a half hour ride on one of my hill courses called Crystal Lake. The course leads south from New Holstein, through the Village of Elkhart Lake, then around Crystal Lake and returns to New Holstein. The total length is 36 miles.

Last year at this time I did this course on my geared bike, so I was able to compare the PowerTap records of the two rides. There are some lengthy flat sections between the hill sections, so overall I would think that a geared bike would be faster. Surprise, today's ride was just as fast as last years ride. On closer analysis, I found that on the flats I was faster on the geared bike, but in the hills I was faster on the single speed. One of the hills is long and very steep at the top. On that hill I was about 5% faster on my single speed. On the other hills I was as much as 10 to 15 percent faster.

I can't explain why I seem to be able to climb better with the single speed, but that is what the data is saying. I have found this to be true on other rides too.

One week to go to the first race.

Mike