My long ride today included a number of hard effort intervals. In order to get these done effectively, I did my long ride at the local park. I chose this location because I knew traffic would be relatively light and because there are very few stop signs to interrupt the flow of the intervals.

As planned, I left early to avoid the heat of the day.  Unfortunately, this didn’t help, because heavy cloud cover led to very high humidity.  The dew point was in the low 70’s.  The result was that the air was saturated, and both myself and my bike were soaking wet for the first few hours of the ride. It was actually quite hard to securely grip the bull horns of my cockpit; they were very slippy.  So much for making plans to avoid the heat!!

My ride started with a quick warm up, followed by a series of very hard, ten minute intervals. This was followed by riding steadily for two hours, before finishing my ride with another set of hard intervals. 

I did all of the hard intervals on the five mile loop around the lake.  For the steady ride, I went exploring a bit more, and rode the hillier sections of the park.  You would think that riding for five hours around a park would be quite boring, but I actually enjoyed it a lot.  I saw a few friends out on their bikes, which is something that doesn’t normally happen on my long rides.

After finishing my intervals, I made my way back home.  I live less than five miles from the park, but getting home is all up hill.  It was a tough way to finish my ride.  Having made it home, I finished my training day with a quick 20 minute run off the bike.  I was all done by early afternoon, and it felt great.