Saturday, March 17, 2012

Winter

Winter has finally arrived in Northern California.  Everyone else in the area has had rain every day for the whole week.  The forecasters predicted rain for us every single day.  Well, they've been 100% wrong and you'll see where this presented problems for us...

Race recovery has gone well.  I had my key bike workout of the week on Thursday and nailed those Z3 & Z4 intervals!

We've got some sort of odd inversion bubble over Silicon Valley so we only had an hour of rain Wednesday night and then a big monsoon Friday night, despite the forecast of nonstop rain.  Otherwise we've been dry as can be and I'm not complaining!  

After last night's hours of heavy rain, we woke up to dry roads this morning but it was COLD.  The forecast was...a 30% chance of "few showers" and that was it.  So I figured we'd be good to go on getting our long ride done.

After my morning swim, we all met up (Jeff, my brother, my aunt and uncle) and headed out for a long ride.  It was quite chilly - low 40s - but everything was dry.  As soon as we reached the "point of no return" it started to rain.  And then it rained more.  It never stopped, for the next 2.5 hours.  Once we were completely drenched, Mother Nature added in some wind, and then some more wind, and then hail just to exfoliate my face nicely post-swim.  I couldn't feel my fingers and toes for most of the ride.  When we got back to the car, Jeff and I pulled off our jackets and socks and shoes, threw our bikes in the vehicle and ran the heater full blast for the drive home trying to warm our toes up enough to feel them.  We raced into the house, dropped all the wet clothes in the laundry hamper and dashed to our hot tub.  After sitting in the HOT TUB still shivering for 10 minutes, we made a break for the steam shower and after running that for a while took a hot shower and dried off.  It wasn't until I had a Baileys & hot chocolate that I finally warmed up.

This is not a happy face, except maybe joy at being done with a miserable ride.  Those are not freckles, they are mud.
 Those are white socks normally.
We weren't the only cyclists on the road today so at least I know I wasn't alone in my stupidity.  I made it my only goal for the day to not crash - it was super wet out there and conditions were definitely sketchy so I rode well very restrained and took all of the big downhills cautiously.  I'm just glad all I have left is a long run tomorrow to end this training block and then I can enjoy a nice rest week!

6 comments:

Steve said...

and you are still smiling for the camera. :) LOL

Jennifer said...

Holy cow... hail?? 40 degrees?? Way to go, miss bad-ass. :-)
What a difference a few miles makes! It's been pouring rain here all week, but today it cleared up. Upper 50s temp, no rain in sight. Crazy!

Wes said...

well, my motto is NEVER go ride when its 40 degrees :-) rain is just a bonus reason to stay home!!

elizabeth said...

Yuck! Nice work on the ride! And I was up in LA, it was god awful on Saturday.

Unknown said...

Wow. Nice job on getting it done, but not fun!

Caratunk Girl said...

Awesome ride!! HAIL makes me get on the trainer to be honest. Brrr!! Nice work!