Week 12 - One Month in to 2009

A recap of the first month of 2009 seems in order for the weekly training update. For January I put in 670 miles, including two long mountain bike rides (January 1st for one of them) and a lot of miles on the road. Clearly the weather this January wasn’t as bad as it could have been which made getting in the big miles pretty easy.

Each weekend of the month I did a ride of at least 4:00, which put me well over 20 hours just from long rides and the miles from those rides totaled over about 310 miles (I don’t keep great track of per ride miles, just monthly totals). In addition I put in some solid work building the body for later races, including a good amount of tempo work and a little higher end efforts on long rides while climbing. Yesterday I climbed Lookout Mountain in sub 24 minutes, which while not fast, is a good pace for this time of the year, especially given half the climb was in zone 3. The legs seem to be responding well to the training and the time up Lookout proves that.

I’ve got two more weeks of base training then I’ll move into the build process (more intensity to get ready for racing) and start to see how the body responds to the more intense efforts. Hopefully the steady work of November through January (ok mid February) will make the harder efforts faster (not easier, cause it never gets easier you just get faster). If I keep up at this pace I’ll be over 8,000 miles for the year. That may be a little extreme, but a 7,500 mile year should be realistic and that will top 2008’s 7,000.