White toxic death

Good blog title, eh? First thing that came to my mind after today's training session. While the past week we here in CO have been like the rest of the country....cold and some snow. Well, it was not until today that we finally got above freezing for the first this week. Temps in the low 40F's were a welcome sight as I headed out on a 4 hour solo mission to complete the training task that LW Coaching laid out. I was on my mtb today only because they do not plow the roads here...and the warm weather was making the roads sloppy....super sloppy. Yeah, I should have fenders for the mtb....but I do not. Honesty, don't think it really would have helped much.

The first 1.5 hours of my session where fine....roads were OK. But the farther south and west I went the worse it got. There was standing water on the roads for miles upon miles at a time. Didn't take long and I was soaked. The spray coming off the front of the front tire was so bad that I could not see my GPS, Suunto HR monitor, or out of my Adidas sunglasses. I wanted to remove my sunglasses, but that would be certain doom for my eyeballs. Everything....and I mean EVERYTHING was covered in a white film from the ice-melt they put on the roads. Question. Wouldn't it be cheaper to plow the roads rather than spray them with chemicals? Just a thought.


I returned home looking like I just got done racing in the hot desert and sweating out all my electrolytes. Not the case. All the white stuff is off the roads. Eeeeek! I am not about to clean the bike until Monday. Need to give the roads a chance to dry off a bit. I am sure tomorrow will be more of the same.

Today, I had the GPS I purchased after X-mas on board that I plan to take on the CTR. I took it along for sake of simply using it, getting use to its operation. I basically didn't touch it. I stuck it on the bike.....turned it on.....and did the ride. The GPS recorded the route....then I uploaded it to geek out on the data it saved.

Here is the route I took today. About 75 miles and 3,800 ft of climbing...that is if the gps data is 100% correct.

Same route as above...but viewed in Google Earth.

And one more for you. This one is HR and elevation off the Suunto T6.