Before I get to today's workout, I should mention that last weekend I was on a 6-person team for the Wild West Relay which is a 195 mile running race from Fort Collins to Steamboat Springs. I was asked by the CSU tri coach at the last minute to join her team, since someone dropped out. I was a little unsure of having to run 30+ miles in 24 hours with little or no sleep, but I actually ended up having a lot of fun. I'll spare the full details, since my camera was out of battery, but it was a little surreal running with a headlamp down a mountain road in Wyoming at 1:30 in the morning, and seeing the occasional flashing red light on another runner's back way off in the distance. I ended up running 34 miles at 7:00 pace (maybe a good goal pace for Hawaii?), and never really felt that sore or fatigues while running but my legs sure were stiff for a few days afterwards.
Anyway, today was my first real long ride, and the topic of the subject line. Before though, I did an open water swim race, 2.4 miles in Horsetooth Reservoir. I came in right around 1:03 which is about a minute off my time in the Ironman, but I didn't wear a wetsuit today so I'm pretty happy with that since it would probably be about 1:00 with a wetsuit. And I won't have a wetsuit in Hawaii, so it was good practice for that.
So afterwards I headed north, than east, way out to US 85, in the plains that are far enough away from the Poudre river and its reservoirs that the land is just used for grazing. Then I headed south towards Severance and back east to Fort Collins. All the while this was happening, it was probably the most humid day I have ever experienced on the Front Range (dew points near 60!), and anytime it's that humid, there is bound to be rain later in the day. Things were looking pretty good at first, with just some haze and high clouds, but I saw the first storm popping up while I was near the Power plant ('m at the center of the fuzzy red dot in the following series of radar images).
Pretty soon, I headed south away from the storm, but I see a few towers popping up far away to the southeast, and it was also getting petty dark over the mountains (which I couldn't see at all, because it was so hazy).
I finally turned to the east, and within a few miles I could make out the mountains through the haze and below the storm clouds. I could see a few areas of more intense rain, directly ahead of me and to the north. This had me worried that I would have to punch through the storm to make it home, but I could tell from watching the clouds earlier that the storms were heading northeast. This meant that there was going to be a gap in the line as I made it back to Fort Collins.
I ended up getting sprinkled on (which was quite a relief from the heat and humidity, actually), but I never got caught in the heavy rain. However I did end up getting pretty wet from riding on the roads where it had rained earlier. Still, it's always a good ride when you get rained on less than the total rainfall over your route while you were riding.That's all for now! Next weekend I have an olympic distance triathlon coming up, so expect a report on that when I'm done, or a few days later.
