Robsworld: Tucson Camp Day 3 and 4

On Monday, all of us took on the mighty Mt. Lemmon. The climb is 27 miles in length and the grade averages 6 to 8 %. The girls got a head start and we steadily climbed from cacti and the warmth of the high Sonoran desert to pine trees and snow and ice at the top of the mountain. Brendan, one of the cycling house staffers was in the van to provide us with food and water and access to our warmer clothes.

Everyone did great. Personally, I over geared and was out of the saddle a bit more than I would have liked. A few years ago, I spun up at 10-12 miles per hour. On this day, I was only managing to hold 8-10 on this climb. It really makes a difference when you use the correct gearing. It was a great strength workout.

This is a great mountain to train on and I saw quite a few professionals and folks from other triathlon camps out there. If I lived here, the ultimate weekly workout for me would be to climb this mountain at threshold with jumps above threshold and occasionally and see how far I could get each week before I blew up. It’s kind of like an over under workout on a mountain.

I guess the best thing I have next to this in Oklahoma is wind and, of course my, Computrainer.

Doug Leib, pictured above, has an altimeter on his watch. Here is a photo of his polar down load. It’s quite impressive. The ride time was between 4 and 5 hours for the group. The pools were closed, so we were unable to get in a swim, but some of us got in a run.

A massage therapist came by that evening and I got a wonderful one-hour massage. Sean Stevens said I looked “worked” after it. It was good.

On Tuesday, Brendan, a former high school runner, took us on a run on the Sabino canyon trails. The dude is smooth. Toby and Sean enjoyed the trail running dodging rocks, while I preferred some half-mile intervals on the flat fine sand horse trails. Here's some of the "Cycling House" special pancakes.

After the run we went for a two and a half hour recovery ride then stopped at “Le Buzz“, a coffee shop, and put the finishing touches on our recovery. On the way back, we saw an old man fall in his driveway. He wasn’t able to get up, so we helped him up. He was out measuring the square footage around his driveway to buy some gravel. Toby and Sean did that for him then we took an easy ride back to the house. He and his wife were thankful. We did our good deed for the day.

After a 15-minute core session, our final workout of the day was a swim. I upped the main set of my workout to 6 x 400’s on the 6:00. A guy got in my lane and shared the other half. He was keeping pace with my 1:05-1:10/100 pace. After talking with him after my workout, it turned out that he swam for Dartmouth and was a distance guy that swam a 15:40 for the 1500. That’s smoking fast. He said that I pushed him, and was glad that I was there. If I had known that, I would have let him lead then I could have circled with him.

When we returned from our workout the boys had our dinner ready, which was delicious. Dana was super hungry.