In February, I ran ~143 miles and rode ~240 miles. So many people were so encouraging. By now, I was letting it leak a little bit what I had signed up for. But, it depended on who asked. If a runner asked, I just told them I was training for Leadville 100. If a cyclist asked, I would say Leadville 100 MTB. It was a pain to explain the whole series and quite frankly, most people didn’t understand when I explained it anyways. I had an album on Facebook called “Training for the Big One” to start documenting what was about to go down. School was in full swing and I was teaching my sports nutrition class at TCU. They knew what I was training for and I used myself as a case study all semester so that worked out well.
A cold day in February!
Followed by a cold day in February!
On February 1st, I got to ride with one of my very best friends, Gail Danielson. We did Hotter n’ Hell 100 together in 2004. It was the only ride I ended up getting to do with her this time around but she did one loop at White Rock Lake with me. Then, I continued on a nostalgic ride going north off the lake loop towards Hillcrest. It was a ride I’d done a hundred times when I lived in Dallas and was training for Ironman. It brought back all the warm and fuzzies. Except, it reminded me of a crash I’d had from an “on the left” mistake. This ride was the end of a recovery week and the ride really felt great. Since I rode the last part alone, I was a little more aware of my body on this ride. I realized I had been fortunate enough to ride with people pretty frequently (at least for the longer rides). I attempted to change up the way I was pedaling because it looked like my knee was turning in and this resulted in some quad pain after this ride was finished. I thought it was me trying to change how I was riding. I still don’t know. But, this was the beginning of about 3 solid months of treating that pain. The week of Cowtown, I had to beg Cyril to squeeze me in for a massage because it was bothering me so bad. Thank you Cyril!
This was also the month that I had to do a long trainer ride because of the weather being bad. That was pretty miserable. I averaged 15 miles per hour. After 30 miles, I DID NOT want to go anymore. My butt hurt sooooo bad. Instead, I watched 2 movies and finished it! I was sooooo tight after this. I was starting to switch my schedule around based on how I felt. But, I still got all the training in. I was having quite a bit of hip pain through this month. I started Epsom salt baths pretty frequently. I felt like I was getting a good idea of how to adjust things around to get around the pain. Madison had introduced erg videos on the trainer. These are power based workouts and are hard! I’m sure it was a combination of everything up to this point so it was hard to figure out if any one thing was causing it, but I was feeling a lot of pain in my hip. Well, it started in my left hip and moved around quite a bit. It made it’s way to both quads and both hips. I was still running some 8:30 tempo runs at this point though. This month had some really hard workouts. Physically and mentally. I was still bad about stretching. Another stupid thing I did was one day when it was raining outside, I went to TCU to hit the treadmill. It was supposed to be a hill workout. I had no idea what to do. It had been years and years since I’d done that so I didn’t remember what to set the treadmill on. The college student next to me had hers at 6.8 so I could do that, right?!
This starting me into doing a bimonthly treadmill workout that Amy Clark shared with me. Thank you Amy! Man, that kicked my butt the first few times. I certainly couldn’t do all of it when I started. As a matter of fact, it took me most of two months to build up to the entire workout which totaled almost 2 hours when it was all said and done. The first few times on the dreadmill really kicked off some pain for me. I never liked the treadmill. I was a necessary evil like the bike trainer. It’s hard to climb in Texas. There aren’t many options. Even on my good hill routes, I was only getting 1000 feet of climbing. Knowing that I was going to need to train up to 12,000 feet of climbing, the treadmill was going to have to be part of my training.
Interspersed through the bad days and the painful days, I obviously had SOME good training sessions too.
It was February that Eugene started putting together some epic gravel rides around Glen Rose, Eulogy and Hico, TX. Eugene always plans the good ones. I knew I’d be spending A LOT of time in the hill country to get some climbing in. It’s still only 2000-3000 ft. of climbing depending on the route and the distance. But, at this point in training, even that was hard! I was so lucky that Eugene planned these routes for me. There’s no way I would have ever done them on my own. And they were beautiful. This month I met Ronnie and Nanette Bryant and Keith from Granbury. We weren’t riding with them that day but were riding opposite them! Throughout my training, they cheered me on and asked about my training and racing every time I saw them.
