Late Dark Horse Ellimpics Entry

XLMIC (many of you know her funny blog) recently hosted a special challenge for us injured folks.

Fittingly on many levels, she called it the "Ellimpics."

I signed up right away for the "One-Hour Recumbent Bike" category. I knew I would win....because who with a choice would ride a recumbent bike for an hour?

XL, being competitive, wanted me to go for something truly epic, like a recumbent century, or even just a metric century. But I balked. I wanted to stick to my training plan, modest as it still is. Moreover, I was three days late in completing the event (the Ellimpics, like their namesake, were supposed to be finished on Sunday).

What can I say. I'm a wimpy sort of Ellimpian.

Perhaps, though, XL will give me points for doing my event on London time (I arrived at the rec center this morning at 5:15 a.m.)...and maybe, if I'm really lucky, she'll take into account all of the miles I've done on this supportive yet boring bike since March, which must have added up to several centuries. I didn't keep track of mileage while on the recumbent. It didn't mean anything to me, and I cared more about RPM. However many miles they were, they certainly felt geological in scale as I was doing them. It was truly Ellimpic level training.

Anyway, here are today's results!

Nearing the end......

I rode exactly 15.75 miles in the allotted 60 minutes.

It's no coincidence that today happened to be one where Darren scheduled me for the bike anyway (I'm down to just one recumbent ride a week now!). So within my Ellimpian effort, I did a typical Darren bike ladder, which today looked like this:

5 minutes easy pedal

4 minutes at 90 RPM
8 minutes at 85 RPM
4 minutes at 80 RPM
4 minutes easy

3 minutes at 90 RPM
6 minutes at 85 RPM
3 minutes at 80 RPM
3 minutes easy

2 minutes at 90 RPM
4 minutes at 85 RPM
2 minutes at 80 RPM
2 minutes easy

1 minute at 90 RPM
2 minutes at 85 RPM
1 minute at 80 RPM

5 minutes cool-down easy

The photo above shows my notebook off to one side. I'd never remember these ladder workouts at that hour without a cheat sheet. Also, you'll see by the low resistance level (5) and the remaining time (only 2 plus minutes left), that I was in the cool-down phase. During the RPM-specific phases, I ratchet that resistance up quite a bit. For the 80s today, I was up to around 10. Probably some of you veteran cyclists could whup me (the thing goes up to 20)...but fortunately none of you were competing against me in the Ellimpics.

So there you have it! Do you think that's good enough for Ellimpic gold?