Week 10 - Wednesday

With the weather improving today, Paul and I decided to get in an outdoor ride followed by a run to get a real sense of the bike/run transition. We when we decided to do this, the temperature was pretty good, maybe high 50s, and the wind was calm. However, by the time we met at my place, the wind had really picked up and was coming nearly straight out of the north. This was going to make the ride interesting.

I jumped on Janis and we headed out for the Joplin route. Once on Ten Mile, we were riding straight into the teeth of what was at least 25mph wind. This stretch was slooow going. Once we reached Chinden and turned west, it was a little easier, but we were getting hit on the right side and had to lean into it pretty dramatically to stay on a straight course. We fought along like this to our planned turnaround 12.5 miles out, and then reversed direction. Because the wind had a slight easterly slant to it, we got at least some push on our way back. The real push came as we finally turned south onto Ten Mile. At this point we were easily exceeding 20mph for the rest of the trip back to my place to end the 25 mile ride. The ride took 1 hour, 41 minutes with an average pace of 15mph.

Once there, we stashed our bikes in the garage, and intended to do a “quick” transition to a 4 mile run. Because I had gotten home too late to really organize things before the ride, it took me a few minutes to even round up my running clothes. The quick transition therefore took a good 5+ minutes. Still not long enough to have my legs adjust though!

From the first running steps, my legs felt like lead logs and my toes felt practically frozen from the cold temps on the ride due to wind chill. This make running feel incredibly awkward. These things nagged at me for about the first mile, and although it felt as if we were running in slow-motion, our pace was low-8, so we were having to intentionally reel that back a bit. I’ve heard from several sources that the key to a good transition to the run is a slow start until your legs adjust, so we tried to follow this plan.

After the first mile, I could feel myself adjusting into a normal, comfortable gait, and we let our pace naturally pick up again. The second half of the run felt good and we arrived back at my house feeling pretty good about the experiment. The run took 36 minutes with an average pace of 9 minute miles. Certainly slow by normal standards, but not bad for the first experiment. I can tell I will need to be doing several more of these, and at longer distances, in the coming weeks.