07-18-07-The Wednesday Noon Ride.gpx-t0

Another attempt to do the Wednesday Noon ride up Old La Honda, this time with my new ‘08 Trek Madone 5.5 with the compact crank (50/34) – I only did the first 1.0 mile of the climb again, and almost got a new PB – did 6:13 (my PB is 6:11 on 6/08/07). When I did that PB, my average heartrate was 162 bpm – for today’s climb, my average heartrate was the same – 162 bpm. After pulling off the climb at the 1 mile mark, I rolled back down to Portola Rd, then headed over to the bottom of Hwy 84, where I sat and waited to rejoin the Noon Goons for the last part of the ride. Something weird happened to my heartrate, however – on the climb up Sandhill, I pushed pretty hard and my heartrate shot up to the 240 bpm area – it wasn’t a funny spike, however – it was real – and lasted for quite a few minutes! In fact, when I tried to participate in the surge at the very end of the ride on Foothill, it shot back up again – I had to drop off the pack for the last mile or so and tried to concentrate on getting my heartrate back to normal. Several hours later, it’s still running high, so I think my conditioning has dropped off considerably – this means my first sanctioned race in 30 years, the Watsonville Criterium, that comes up this Saturday, might be pretty tough for me…we’ll see…my average speed of 17.9 mph is very close to my previous record 18.0 mph when I did this same route back on 6/13/07 (about one month ago).