I'm back in the office for a week, after two weeks of campouts and work travel with only one lap last Tuesday. Should be four laps this week.
I've been feeling really good the last few months about how many commutes I am getting in but I was forced to realize this weekend it's not enough. My oldest kid recently graduated from Cub to Boy Scouts, and we went on a hike for about six miles in Calaveras Big Trees. I'm accustomed to my kid hiking pretty slowly - he doesn't really want to. So I brought up the rear with him. But I was dismayed how much I also huffed and puffed up the climbs. With a heart surgery behind me and a boutique wonder drug for my condition, I can't really blame my heart for it, at least not completely. I need to push harder on my rides, and do more miles than the 7 mile round trip at no-challenge pace.
Perhaps in part due to the work travel, and the season, I have been waking very early. I decided to try to use this to my commuting advantage and come in to the office early too. I don't need to stay home in order to shoo the kids to school until August. This also helps with most of my coworkers being on Central time, and I can go home earlier without guilt so I can split summer kid management with my wife. So far I haven't made it as early as I'd like. I need to make some changes - not going to bed with anything planned to do in the morning, no badge hunt or shoe hunt, no hot breakfast. Assuming I get good at it, I would like this regime to persist at least through June.
Originally Posted by
pdlamb
I think that would be a good one-way daily commute. So if your wife has a car, and presumably you have a car, have you considered driving your car to work with the bike on Monday, riding the bike home, then riding in to work Tuesday and drive the car home (with or without the bike, depending on parking security)? You could get two round trip commutes in every week, and a recovery day on Wednesday.
One way of thinking about this is that it's two rides on two days which doesn't sound too bad... but another way is that it's 50 miles within 16 hours on no training, which sounds like a pretty hard start!
Originally Posted by
wasie_mi
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my post and offer suggestions. I really hadn't worked out a strategy at all and didn't give this endeavor more than 5 minutes planning. Fact of the matter is, over Memorial Day weekend I watched my son run a half marathon while my son-in-law did the full marathon in the TC Bayshore Marathon. I looked at the 60-64 yo results and saw that an 8-1/2 min/mi pace could get you in the top ten and said to myself, I could do that by next year. Of course, just because I could do that 12 years ago I probably should still be able to do it now, right? Mind you, I get gassed taking the stairs up to my third-floor office.
...
Here's a post from me back in the day: (where have all the commuters gone?)
2013 Commuting Mileage Thread - End of Year
Mechanova (MI) ______________________ 2165
See above - I also got shamed by a bunch of kids.
There have been several generations of social media apps come and gone since the heyday of BBS's, unfortunately for our little community here. Some of us are hanging on. But for sure it's dismaying that the entries on the mileage thread used to have like fifty people and now it's five or six