Sunday, March 29, 2009

Group Rides and On-Bike Nutrition

So this week I was on-call, so no racing for me. When this is the case I do blocks of intervals, but I also will get in some group rides to simulate race-level efforts. The first group ride of the week was the Tuesday Night Ride by the river - one of the only flat roads around Asheville. I was looking for some hard tempo, sprints, and VO2 level efforts. Unfortunately, despite Marios' (the new ABRC president) best efforts the A group again swelled to somewhere around 30 people. Too big for a good workout, good paceline, good sprint workout, or good safety for that matter. Just an all-around bad situation. I may have ruffled some feathers as non-diplomatic Chris was out that night, but the bottom line is it is a great ride with a lot of potential if we can tweak it a bit.

My second group ride of the week was today, where I met a group out of Marshall to do the French Broad Classic Road Race course (to be held in July). What a sweet course! 2 long 2-3 mile climbs, tight, windy roads and beautiful scenery are going to make this an awesome race! I'm really psyched for this event! I was able to get a good workout in while having fun with some of the other local riders as well as some from Mars Hill College. The ride also gave me a chance to test my nutrition plan for next weekend's road race at Rock Hill. I had my typical pre-race or long-ride meal, 3 hours prior, of homemade granola (I love my wife) with greek yogurt - although sometimes I'll have eggs or hot oats. On the bike nutrition was simple - about 200-300 calories an hour. Honey Stinger is a sponsor this year (which I'm super-thankful for since I think their gels taste better than anything else on the market!), but they don't have a drink mix. So I used Perpetuem from Hammer Nutrition (my old sponsor), spiked with Honey Stingers every hour. Perfect! No cramps, good energy levels, 550kcal total consumed over 3 hours.

So after a relaxing weekend, I'm ready for a productive week at work and a great race weekend next week. I hope you are too!

- Chris

1 comment:

WNC Jim said...

Hi Chris-

I'm not sure if you would remember me, but we met a couple of weeks ago; I live two houses up from your new house. I'm really not a stalker, but I wanted to get in touch with you, so I did some googling and found this blog.

I wanted to let you know that we have lots of boxes left over from our move that we'd be happy to let you have if you need them. They range from big to small, and we also have plate and glass sleeves to protect them.

If you're interested, let me know. Probably the best way to reach me is by e-mail at jimgrode (at) gmail (dot) com.

Even if you don't need boxes, welcome to the neighborhood, and we look forward to seeing you.

Jim Grode