As well as heading out for my training ride this morning, I also spent an hour taking part in the Brynt McSwain Memorial Ride. Some of you may remember me mentioning Brynt a couple of weeks ago. He was a member of the local triathlon community and was tragically killed when he was hit by a car in a hit and run incident. Brynt's funeral was yesterday and some of the local community decided to organise a memorial ride this morning in his memory.
The ride itself was amazing. I think everyone suspected that a lot of people would show up and indeed they did, with estimates putting the number of cyclists up over the 600 mark.
As you can see, a very impressive sight. I can't take credit for the photo by the way, I have liberated it from John Varga's facebook.
However, something like this is always a very mixed experience. As great as it was to see everyone out showing their support and remembering Brynt, you can't escape the fact that tragedy was the catalyst for the event. As such it was a bit of a sombre ride. Everyone shared the amazement at the experience, but I don't think anyone forgot for a second why we were there. Bittersweet.
As well as the memorial ride I did actually do some training this morning. 100km or so with some hill repeats and a number of high intensity long intervals. Really it would have been nice to get the session done before the memorial ride, but with Brynt's ride starting at 7:00, doing so would have meant being on the bike at 4:00am, which I wasn't going to do. Instead I starting riding at about 5:00 with the intention of getting a couple of hours done before the memorial ride and then finishing it off afterwards. Unfortunately a puncture after a bit more than an hour of riding meant that I lost time and ended up doing about 90 minutes before the memorial ride and 90 minutes after.
The session was good, but tough, even broken up like it was. My legs felt a bit flat today and the hill repeats really took a bit of zap out of them from the start. After the hill repeats I struggled to get the intervals going. I got through them all, but I am unsure of the quality of them. In the end having the session broken up like that led to a bit of a disjointed morning. Still I wouldn't have missed the memorial ride for anything.
Training this afternoon was a swim down with Swim Smooth squad. Today's main set was a session we do now and then which is always tough. It is made up of 15 x 100m, but it is written that way just to make you feel better. Really it is a 1500m race. The way it works is that every 100m you change what you are doing. All the odd numbered 100s are just freestyle, every even numbered 100 is some kind of drill, usually pull buoy, or bands, something with fins etc. During the 1500m almost anything goes, drafting is encouraged, so is overtaking. The idea is that you want to be the person to finish the 1500m first. The time you have between each 100 is only a couple of seconds as you either grab a piece of equipment or get rid of one. In fact the the time between each 100 is usually as quick as you can get it since if you can do it quickly it is a good way to grab some free time over the rest of the people in your lane. If the session sounds stressful and hard, it sort of is. Just like a race. The final 100m always ends up being a sprint for the line. The session is a fun one, but it sure does hurt.
For tomorrow I have a session on the trainer followed by a slightly longer run. By slightly longer I mean 14km, which will be the longest run I have done for a while. I am at the stage injury wise where I am pretty confident that I will pull up okay. Hopefully my fitness does the same.
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