Saturday: Bike 36 miles, run 2.5 miles
Despite saying I was going to take this week one day at a time, I'd been dreading today's workout. The main biking set was to hold a 75% heart rate for 11.2 miles (one-tenth of the race distance). Twice. It was supposed to be timed, but since I was biking outside, I scrapped the whole 11.2 idea entirely and just did it for 42 minutes. Twice.
I've calculated that my 75% maximum heart rate for biking is 131 (141 for running) but I actually find it really hard to get there and stay there. For most of this ride I had to settle for upper 120s (and a voice in my head screaming, "Faster! Faster!"). I spent the whole ride trying to figure out why it's so hard for me to maintain an aerobic pace on the bike, and the only thing I could come up with is that my saddle is so darn uncomfortable that I'm in actual pain even when I'm not working that hard, so it raises my perceived exertion.
That's just a fancy way of saying that I'm going to try to convince my husband that it's a great idea to drop $150 on a new saddle.
But seriously, I'm going to be biking a lot more miles, and there's a limit to how much more pain I can "get used to." As soon as I got home I started Googling, and here's what I think I want:
Isn't it pretty? See that cut-out area? That's the part that's not going to hurt any more!
I've also been researching biking shorts, and it turns out there's a whole universe of $130 high-tech shorts that apparently feel like you're wearing fluffy clouds, but I really think the saddle is the place to start.
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