Recovery (Sort Of)

Today was a recovery day. Not that I did anything spectacular yesterday from which I needed to recover. So I guess we should call it a precovery day, because tomorrow I’ll hit it hard. Today, just a couple of vaguely triathlonistic activities to mention:

1) You could say I went for a five-mile walk this evening. Or you could say I fled the house, escaped like a prisoner, my first desperate gasps of freedom and fresh air coming 10 hours after waking up (each and every one of those hours spent shackled to my chair save for the servicing of the necessary bodily functions). Correction: There was one foray to the out of doors, a reach for the morning paper. Freaking awesome Oregonian delivery grunt puts the thing right against the door nearly every time; only one foot makes it out. The neighborhood thus rarely if ever gets to see me in my underpants as I skip sprightly down the porch steps in the predawn chill, bent on retrieval. That's right, bent. Anyway, you’d think someone would get up early to slide the O down the walk a bit, for thrills.

2) In the morning, I did ride. It was something a little different. I didn’t hook the Computrainer to the computer; instead, I just set the ergometer to 150 watts and began pedaling. After a while, I moved it up to 165, then to 180. I left it there for the rest of the ride.

The idea was that I didn’t want to race Pacer Guy up and down hills because I can never lose to him must never lose to him refuse to lose to him so I always hammer it. I just wanted to maintain good cadence (around 80), keep the heart rate in line, and ride a bit. Precovery. Up top, that’s the heart-rate chart. The big dip came when I stopped to remove my shirt. But you can see that I was between 115 and 120 for most the ride, once I got going. That’s about 65 percent of max. That’s a good place to be once in a while. Of course, you could say it would be better if I was there for a three of four hour stint, rather than one lousy hour. Don’t think I don’t know that.