Madison Training Ride

I have had July 11 picked out as the date for the IM training ride for about 8 months ago. I can't believe the day is already done and we had a beautiful day to ride.

Friday about noon Olaf and I headed to Madison to stay with Lynn and Greg. Lynn had a great BBQ on Friday night with some friends and awesome food. Saturday morning at 7 am I met Sue and Erin in Verona at the Firemans Park to ride the 40 mile loop twice.

Something I want to remember (not that I'm going to do this again) is that Firemans park has a really nice small lake and a lot of people do a swim there before going out to bike and there's some trails nearby for running on. There's food, showers and restrooms there. A really nice place to park for the day to train.

It's broken into three stages I learned this week. The first is from Verona to Mt. Horeb and it's a steady climb. The second is Mt. Horeb to Cross Plains and that is mostly down hill...kind of scary big downhills. The third stage is from Cross Plains back to Verona and that is the hard one. It has the "three sisters" or "three bitches"...personally I think there is four because there is a 4th climb that is a killer after the other three hills. Erin joined us for the first loop and was full of so many tips and advice that I could have asked her questions all day. She did the IM in 2007. We met up with Ryan and a friend just before the three big hills and they biked with us for a bit. We dropped Erin off in Verona and did it a second time. The first time wasn't bad at all. The second was hard towards the third stage. The most surprising thing was that you don't get to spend much time in your aero bars. You are either rocketing down a hill 40 MPH I hit or going up and climbing. The other thing is you are always shifting. Always! My hands were pretty sore from this ride. I'm use to shifting for the hills and then relaxing on my aero bars and not shifting the entire ride. We averaged 14.5 for the entire ride. I was happy with that. If I can do that the day of the race I will be thrilled.

Olaf, Lynn and Greg found us on the course which was awesome. They stopped in Mt. Horeb to check on us and then drove the course to check out the hills. Later they were waiting for us in Verona at the park sitting in the shade having subs. Sue went for a run after the bike but there was no way I could turn down a sub in the shade and someone to drive me back to Lynn and Gregs house after a long biking day. It was a great day, now it's time for some sleep!