Week 11: Struggles and stretches

Today (Sunday) marks only ten weeks until 4K send-off. Ten weeks from this moment I will be somewhere on the road between Baltimore and Frederick with my team, thousands of miles between us and San Francisco. No words. Other than “I’m nervous and don’t feel prepared”! Not being able to ride much this week didn’t help with that feeling, but I did my best to prep off the bike.

Monday was a bit of a struggle. I actually did get a fair amount of work done but was really struggling to motivate myself. After a few hours of trying to convince myself to go to the gym I finally walked over and did an upper body workout. I don’t know why but my imposter syndrome was high that day. It can be really scary to navigate the gym when you’re new and it seems like everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing, but I try to remind myself that no one really cares what other people are up to.

Tuesday was an even bigger struggle. The weather was beautiful so I went out for a ride but if I’m being honest, it sucked. The wind was against me, I felt super low energy, and I just wasn’t mentally in it. I took it slow and tried not to beat myself up because there’s truly no point in that– I went out and biked 25 miles when I really wasn’t feeling it, so that’s a victory in my book. The good news: even though I felt slow and awful, my average speed was a little higher than my all-time average speed on this route. That means at least some of my training is starting to pay off!

One thing I’ve been trying to focus more on recently is yoga. I’ve never been flexible (the sit-and-reach test in elementary school P.E. was my worst nightmare) but there are so many physical and mental benefits from stretching. My hamstrings are ridiculously tight so a goal of mine is to loosen them up, but really my whole body could use some extra mobility. On Wednesday I stayed in from the rain to do a quick yoga video to stretch out my sore upper body. I highly recommend Yoga with Adriene on YouTube if you want to get started with short practices!

The weather was a bit gloomy the rest of the week so I opted for indoor workouts. I tried to go to a spin class on Thursday but it was full so I headed up to the weight room instead and had a nice leg day, followed up by some yoga Friday morning and an upper body lift later in the day. Saturday and Sunday became rest days as I tried to knock out as much school work as I could, but I snuck in some stretches and short walks.

All of my non-training updates are about gear this week! The first isn’t 4K-related but was really exciting to me: I finally received my free kit for participating in the Kentucky Cycling Challenge last year! Last year I completed three centuries, one “metric plus” century (long story, you can read about it here), and a bonus metric century that didn’t count toward the challenge. This totaled 461 miles, 27,294 feet of elevation gain (almost the height of Mt. Everest!), and $237 in registration fees, all so I could get this free kit. Worth it? Sure.

Actually though, these rides were great mental preparation for 4K. I had never experienced elevation like there was on some of these routes. The Horsey Hundred in particular was good experience for riding tough routes on back-to-back days. I somehow convinced James to participate in both days of the ride with me (and camp overnight LOL) so we ended up doing the full century on Saturday and a 75-mile ride on Sunday through the hills (mountains?) of Kentucky… it was brutal but a big accomplishment.

I could talk about those rides for hours but I digress. The kit was originally delivered in December but the package went missing. The folks at Primal Wear were kind enough to replace it for me but it took a while because it was a custom order. I was eager to give it a test ride but the weather just wasn’t great for riding, and definitely not for riding in shorts and short sleeves :( Hopefully next week!

If you’ve been thinking to yourself, “Man, I wish I could support Lauren and the Ulman Foundation by repping some sweet 4K gear”, you’re in luck! Ulman launched a fundraising campaign with Bonfire this week with some t-shirts to support the cause. You can find the order page for Team Zion (my team) here. There’s also some more generic Ulman gear on the site, and I’m toying with the idea of making my own design… we’ll see. Orders close on April 22nd!

As always, feel free to ask any questions about the ride, training, or fundraising!

Until next time,

Lauren