You know the problem with having good fitness, or for that matter, bad fitness? Well, not really bad fitness, but feeling bad or not riding well. The problem is that when I’m riding good, that’s all I want to do. It is easy to train hard. It is easy to do anything. But, when I’m riding bad, nothing comes easy. Everyday life is difficult, so it is hard to accomplish any hard task.
I think it has something to do with your blood. I posted earlier, I think I might have been riding better at the first of March than I am now. That was after nearly two complete months of not riding. I know that I have a lot of miles on my legs and I don’t lose form very quickly. But, that doesn’t explain being able to ride at race pace without any racing. Or training at race pace.
Why I think it has something to do with your blood is that when I’m riding well, I can do almost anything physically great. When I have a great day training, I can plop down on the floor and knock off 100 sit ups without any stress at all. But, when I’m riding badly, I might only get to 30 and then can barely struggle to 50. It isn’t a training thing. It is a muscle supply issue. Your muscles are getting supplied everything they need to function properly.
Right now, I”m just going mediocre. Yesterday I went for a 70 mile ride to Lawrence. It was in the upper 90’s and super muggy. Heat index off the charts. I was pretty good until 10 miles to go. I met up with Bill and had to stop almost immediately. I drank a 32 oz. Coke and a 32 oz. Gatorade. I felt better riding into town. When I got home, I weighed myself and was still 9 lbs. light. That was after drinking over 4 lbs. of liquid within the last 1/2 hour. That seems a little extreme. I’m still 5 lbs. lighter than yesterday. Maybe I was over hydrated? Probably not.
You drank 32 oz. of Coke which is loaded down with lots and lots of High Fructose Corn Syrup, bad enough on its own, but it’s a hypertonic solution, too, and then drank 32 oz of Gatorade, also which as sold is hypertonic with respect to sugar. I’m surprised you made it home. Did you drink lots of water when you got home? Were you thirsty? It must have been all that sugar being available… Super muggy means that heat transfer by means of sweating isn’t efficient, so what the body does is to sweat more, so you lose more water, so that may explain the weight loss (and the mugginess means you may not notice how much you’re sweating)