Now as I alluded to in my Cyclocross piece, if you want to be a solid moutain biker, get a road bike, or better yet a Cross Bike. Most high level racers know that tons of road miles will make you faster in the dirt. Again it's the whole "cadence with power" thing.
Having a Cross bike means you can race Cross in the fall and get the training associated with that. Plus they tend to be a little more robust in their build and hold up well under the demands of commuting. My Cross bike (a Lightspeed Appalachian) is actually a touring frame that is pretty well regarded in Cross circles as a solid bike if not a bit of a vintage design. But it is Ti and it rides damn smooth. At about 20lbs it is heavy by road bike standards but that extra weight will make ya stronger. So it's all good!!!
I've been commuting to work now for about a month and I'm actually pretty fortunate. You see you can't really pick your commute. The type of training you get from your commute is based on where you live and where you work. Yeah, you can route your commute to get a specific workout, but if you just want to ride back and forth to work, well you're kinda stuck with the route you got.
My route is pretty cool. It covers 13 miles one way or 26 miles round trip. Thats a pretty good bit of distance to pound in one day for training. It covers about 1900' of elevation, which is also a nice bit of climbing to work around. It has flats to work on power or speed intervals and the climbs are gradual enough to really gear up and work out of the saddle.
But the thing that is really cool is in the morning it's more of a downhill ride, which makes it fast and I don't work up too much of a sweat. There's a few hills to keep it interesting but it's pretty straight forward. Now on the way home it's more of an uphill run which allows me to get in some good interval sessions.
There are some busy streets and intersections I need to negotiate but generally it's what I would call a fairly safe route. In fact almost a 1/4 of it is on an Albuquerque City bike path which is really nice. Now I wouldn't call it pretty, but I'll talk about "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" in another post. For now here's my GPS map. Like I said, a great way to get my training in and I'm helping to reduce my carbon foot print to boot. So commute to work and get the benefits that only road training can provide....but be safe out there!!!
1 comment:
Commuting is loads of fun....but the longer and tougher commutes like yours put the wear and tear on your legs and make it difficult to train effectively. You need rest to go all out for max training effort, and those commuter miles nip the high end right out of ya. It's an unfortunate biproduct.
I ran into that issue when in ABQ as my commute was about the same as yours.
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