Intervals, and Lance

I watched Lance Armstrong last night and was struck by the disconnect between his admission of guilt, his admission of being a bully, but his holding on to the belief that those around him had a choice in their decision to dope.  He clearly did not fully comprehend the power of the powerful bully.  Tonight, as I watched him tear up when talking about having to tell his oldest son not to defend him, I felt that perhaps he is truly on a journey of discovery.  Certainly, I want to believe that, because that is my nature, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  I also understand his desire to compete again, even if it would only be doing the Chicago Marathon when he turns 50.  I understand the drive to succeed, because I have it as well.  Ironically, for me, triathlon has been a healthy outlet for that drive.  I will never win a race, I will probably never win my age group, but that's never what matters.  To me it continues to be about testing my limits and giving it my best.

Today I did three 15 minute intervals up Stunt Road.  My effort was supposed to be right around my half ironman effort, so I kept my heart rate in Zone 2 to Zone 3 range the first two times and kept a very respectable 8mph pace up a 6% grade.  The third time, I did push harder and ended up in Zone 4, increasing my pace to 8.6mph.  For good measure, once I finished, I rode up Stunt one more time in a very comfortable Zone 2 effort.  Then, rode home.  Two hours and fifty minutes of cycling, 4500 feet of climbing, and I still felt good.  Good enough to spend the next five hours with my daughters, going to lunch and the mall.  I also managed to get in about 35 minutes of dry land swim training on my VASA swim trainer.

In two weeks I'm doing a half marathon.  In just 10 weeks, I'll be doing the California 70.3.  I'm hoping that all of my hill training will finally allow me to have a solid bike ride on what I used to find a challenging course.  I say used to find, because I looked it up today and discovered that there is "only" 1500 feet of climbing on the course.  These days, that's really not much to me!  It's certainly all relative.