Lexington finally had some semi-decent weather at the beginning of the week so I tried to take advantage by getting back on track with the 4K training plan. I wasn’t perfect, but I’m slowly but surely getting my weekly mileage up!
Sunday: One of the only flaws of the Legacy Trail is that it basically runs due north and the wind in Lexington often comes from the south. Anytime the wind is above like 10 mph I cruise on the way up and suffer on the way home. I suffered a bit but it was still a nice day for a ride, and I suspect this will end up being good practice for crossing the Midwest.
Monday: I got out for another windy afternoon ride, but it was so warm I hardly cared! I didn’t do the full trail because my legs were a little tired and the last stretch by the horse park is brutal when the wind is strong. I did get a few PRs on some of the trail segments for the first time, which is always a good feeling.
Tuesday: I made it to the gym later in the evening for leg day. It was crazy busy and I made an absolute fool of myself trying to use the calf raise machine for the first time… it’s tough being a new gym-goer.
Wednesday: The day got off to a pretty rough start, at least mentally. It was just one of those days where I woke up in a bad mood. I went for a walk (both to clear my head and to get some groceries) and then got to work cleaning data for my thesis. I collected tweets using a Twitter programming interface which was super useful but the output isn’t very user-friendly, so I’ve been going through what I have and manually cleaning it up. It’s pretty mindless work but gets super tedious after a few days… I ended up powering through 3,200 tweets (half of my dataset) because I didn’t want to spend another day working on it. I had to sacrifice the scheduled 15 mile recovery ride to get it done but it was a big weight off my shoulders!
Thursday: I came very close to putting off that recovery ride again until I realized…
Ahhhhh! So exciting but so scary! The walk home from the gym was actually worse than 15 miles on the stationary bike thanks to some yucky freezing rain. I braved it again to go meet some friends from my program at a bar nearby, something we hadn’t done in a long time!
Friday: I deemed it too cold to bike, but not too cold to run! For some reason I felt compelled to attempt a 5K despite the fact that I hadn’t run that far since October 2020. I plodded through and even had some snow flurries join in on the fun :)
Saturday: A much needed rest day, my legs are not used to running! I drove home to Maryland and was super stiff after 9 hours in the car.
Mileage: 60.8 miles/3 rides
This week felt a lot last week, so no new lessons learned this time! Stay tuned for an upcoming March Madness fundraiser and some more information about the trip itself :)
Until next week,
Lauren
Lauren Bikes America 
Wow. Learning a lot about bike training! Thank you for sharing.
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