Devil Mountain Dummy: Redux

Well... as I mentioned in another thread, 2012 marks out tenth year of doing SAG for the Devil Mountain Double. I trained hard for this ride in 2006 and had an epic failure at mile 133.

http://tandemhearts.smugmug.com/Bicy...28_zyXUL-M.jpg

I'm glad Thom took this picture because my face says it all for me. Getting off the bike was the right thing.

This time, we're doing it together. Having each other as support will make the ride a lot more fun. We're both in much better shape than we have ever been. Between a new bike and personal weight loss, I'll be 25 pounds lighter this go around. Besides the ride organizer has already given me the jersey. I just gotta earn the right to wear it. :D

Veronica

Awesome!

So what's the training plan? Mine is again brevet-based. It just works for me. This is what I am planning (assuming DMD is last Saturday in April as usual. If it moves, I will do a different 400k):

1/28 SRCC 200k
2/25 SRCC 200k
3/10 SF 300k
3/24 SRCC 300k
4/14 Davis 400k
4/28 DMD

After DMD I need to figure out what to do to prep for TT. Doing a 600k last year did NOT work for me. It worked fine for my riding partner. I am going to be doing a lot more climbing intensive rides - probably with SRCC. They have some TT specific rides. I will probably also do Davis. There's enough pacelining in TT that doing Davis hard is appropriate.

ETA: Oh and by the way that wasn't an "epic failure" you had in 2006 - it was a learning opportunity. :) I learned a lot from TT this year. :)

Very cool! Go get 'em Veronica! And Sarah...you are an animal! :p

We're still working out the details. Right now we're trying to do at least one 60 - 70 ish mile ride once a month. Ride with the fast club guys once a month to try to increase my speed. Neither of us has ridden more than 70 in quite awhile. Thom's gotten quite fast. He's really slimmed down and gotten way more muscly in the last year. He only weighs a pound more than I do now. I try to not let that bug me. Tiny girl I am not. :p

The trick is balancing everything. I'm still working on my running for tri and I won't stop that to train for DMD. I'm alternating weekends with tough rides and tough runs.

This is the only double either of us plans on doing, so we're working out ways to ride bits of the course mostly. This month we did Diablo Junction/MT and just MT from Heather Farm. That's the ride I bonked on. We were suppose to go the summit also.

Veronica

We did a great ride with Glenn last year as DMD prep - both sides of Hamilton from Alum Rock, then up Sierra. It was only 60 miles or so but with 9,000 feet of climbing! http://app.strava.com/rides/405601 Super fun ride. (Glenn suggested adding Sierra).

I will probably plan to do that route again about 3 weeks to a month out from DMD. I will let you know when. :)

You might consider throwing in some of the brevets I mentioned as your long ride for the month. I love starting with the 200k in January - it is a super fun/easy course for an early 200k. The February one is a lot harder. And this year it snowed. :rolleyes: Both times I have done DMD the 400k was the perfect last long ride for me. And oddly the 400k always took almost exactly the same amount of time, even though both DMDs/400ks took quite different amounts of time for me (three hours less last year than 2007). It's a weird correlation and I am interested to see if it holds again this year.

That would be a challenge to fit it all in with the tri training.