Alphabet

One of my friends asked me on Saturday what my training goals were now that the season was over. Racing season that is. I did five races over the past two months. Without really training for racing them. That proved to be particularly difficult, especially the first one, an iconic hill climb that attracts nearly 500 racers. I thought I would die. It seemed so much tougher than the same race two years ago. It was much hotter and I ended up only 15 seconds slower. I was 50 seconds faster during the next hill climb race than two years ago. My speed during three time trials got progressively faster. So I felt good about my relative short racing season. But I digressed, so back to the subject of the post. 

I told my friend that my goal was the same as the past fifty years--to stay fit. Upon thinking about it later, I had already set specific goals for the winter. The first letter of a few of them start off our alphabet. So I will try to write about the goals. I thought about them during today's ride. They will not all be training related, but they will be cycling related. There will be repeats for a particular letter too. 

So here goes and I might as well start with two letters:

AB stands for aerobic base. Some call this aspect foundational training. Anything that must be strong must have a solid base. I have read many books and articles on base training. One that has resonated is the Maffetone method. You can google it or go to your library. He advocates low heart rate training. He says that by sticking to his method, one will go longer and eventually faster. It incorporates a maximum heart that one should never go over. One has to be patient with this. So I set my heart rate monitor for a warning sound when I hit this heart rate. I exceeded it a couple of times today. Hills at altitude raise the heart rate so I have to learn to slow down. 

I will also include a photo for each post. Fall is my favorite time of the year. We are often blessed with totally sunny days. The photo shows one of them with trees beginning to turn colors. The lake is Chatfield reservoir. I go near it on most days and never tire of it.