"Training Camp" on the North Shore

Last weekend I headed up to my cabin on the north shore of MN for some chilling and cycling.  The crew consisted of Sam, Peder, and Havey, all former college teammates.  My brother, Eric and his girlfriend Megan met up with us the next day.  Although I wasn't able to swim (did run a few miles finally), I got in some good riding on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  

Friday started out with a morning tempo run for the other three guys, out 30 min and back in around 24ish for Peder.  I put in 2 miles.  Got a little ice bathing in at the mouth of the Temperance river.  The water is still on the 'too damn cold' side as my foot turned purple in 3 minutes.  Sam and I road inland on a nice road with little traffic and rolling hills.  We put in about 39 miles and got poured on for the last 45 minutes.  The rest of the night consisted of grilling and relaxing by a bonfire right off the shore of lake superior.  

Saturday was our hard bike workout day.  Eric, Sam, and I left from my cabin and traveled down 61, a highway paralleling Lake Superior.  It is not the best road to bike on due to narrow shoulders and alot of cracks, but we needed a good 30 minutes of warmup before attacking the workout and hills.  20 minutes in Sam had a crash on a pretty nasty crack in the road.  Luckily he made out with very little road rash and the road was clear of traffic at the time.  Things could have been alot worse...We reached the bottom of the 1.8ish mile hill that has yet to be named and started our 3 hill repeats.  Then we cruised for 20 minutes and started a tempo ride.  We road 15 minutes out, which had a gradual uphill and a headwind.  For a point of reference, we turned around and made it back in 7:40 and averaged 35 mph.  We must have looked good because a car passed us and took a picture.  The last third of the tempo ride we averaged around 26 miles an hour on more rolling hills.  All in all we did nearly 30 minutes of hill climbing and 33 minutes of tempo riding, which is the longest bike workout I have ever done, outside of races.  Sam put in another run in the afternoon, Eric studied (he still has a month left of his first year of med school) and I went hiking with the other guys.  More bonfires, hot-tubbing and some beer in the evening.

Sunday was an easy 34 miles and a 4 mile run and Peder and Havey ran 14 miles.

I'll post pictures when Havey gets them to me.  

On another note, I hit a quarter century of life today.  Better get a pool workout in now since I haven't done one for awhile...