I'm Over the Hill!!!

No, not that hill.  This hill is one to be happy you are over.  Who says they don't have hills in the Houston area?  I live in RoseHILL and not far from a road called West Mount Houston (still looking for the mountain).  Anyway, the hill I'm refering to is in the picture below.  It's the new Derby Hill Park in Hockley, TX - yes, for soap box car racing.  It happens to be about 3 miles from the end of our Saturday morning bike ride, which makes it a bit of a challenge after clocking in 38 miles or so.  It doesn't do wonders for monitoring my heat rate over the duration of the ride, however, as my HR monitor showed a quick trip up to 180bpm when I reached the top.  Depending on the algorithm used that's close to, or even over, my heart rate max.

I was very happy to be tackling this hill at the end of the ride because it signalled a much better result than I had the previous week where I was fading badly towards the end.  I was a little concerned going into the ride that maybe I just wasn't ready yet. 

While we were exiting the park I noticed a pop-up shade for the Cy-Tri Cub and went over to chat for a few minutes.  They appeared to be using the hill for running intervals.  I need to get involved with them as I'm sure they could help with the prep for the sprint tri I'm scheduled to do in August.  They were encouraging about me joining, stating that all levels of fitness participate but I'm reminded of a line from the Kung Fu Panda movie - "Now, there is a level zero".

Back to the bike ride: I met up with my cycling friends from the previous week including Sarah, Nick, Dean, and Therese but also met some new folks:  Rosanne and Lewis.  We left at 7:15am and the ride took us about 2h:45m to go some 37 miles, which was basically a loop from Zube Park to Prairie View, TX and back.  Somewhere during the ride we made a reference to a pace group coming up the road which one of us referred to as a "Flock of Seagulls".  The "Flock" name stuck and we had too much goofy fun using the word inappropriately.

So, differences that resulted in a much better ride I attribute to:
1) Riding at a better pace, typically from 14-17mph.  The previous week I went with a pace group that hardly ever backed down from 18mph so I became fatigued over time.
2) Having a bottle of sports drink and an energy bar to go with my other bottle of water.  I believe that during the previous week and having only water didn't sustain my energy over the full 3 hours.
3)  Forgot coffee!  Yeah, I'm a caffeine addict and I think the lack of caffeine just piled onto the stress.

So, biking is looking a LOT better after my big ride on Saturday.  I felt energized at the end like I wanted to go out again.  In other sports:  running is coming along nicely.  I'm on week 5 of my "Couch to 5K" training plan.  I'm continuing to monitor the occasional pain I'm experiencing in the ball of my left foot but it hasn't gotten any worse.  Considering going in to the doc to inquire about it, especially if the pain gets worse.  Not a big fan of unnecessary x-rays.

I've ordered a swim workout book to help me get a kick start on that aspect of my training and also a couple of marathon/half marathon training books.

The daily workouts on my Outlook calendar have been excellent for keeping my on pace.  Need to spend more time with strength training as I've been focused so much on the cardio lately.  Hard to time it so that weight training doesn't get in the way of the other workouts.