Jud’s Rando Training Blog

I walked into the gym this morning feeling anxious and a bit doubtful.  The Cyclepaths had a two-hour ride but I didn’t have time for that today, with work commitments.  I decided I would do my 20-20 intense indoor spin bike ride.  This actually means 5 minutes of warmup, followed by 20 minutes of threshold/red […]

In the last entry I mentioned one of my cardinal rules of eating: eat like a king at breakfast, like a prince at lunch and like a pauper at dinner.  That is one of several rules that I have learned to follow in my daily battle to stay healthy and thin (though one doesn’t necessarily […]

Super Bowl Sunday is less than three months away.  When it arrives, and assuming I haven’t thrown all of my carefully formed eating habits out of the window in the meantime, I will celebrate the 10th anniversary of what I hope will be a lifetime diet.  As of this morning, I am 59 pounds under […]

PA Route 191 heading south at the very start of the Fox Gap climb. You can see the gap in the upper left. The top is 2.7 painful miles away. (Photo by Christine Newman)

Sometimes, the way I feel at the beginning of a ride does not foretell accurately how I will feel at […]

My returned brevet card for Quadzilla 2010, signed by organizer Mark Frank, with my time of 39 hours, 18 minutes, arrived in the mail today.  It’s appropriate timing.  Quadzilla was my big goal of the year and yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of this blog.I haven’t decided on my goal for 2011, though the early […]

I like the changing rhythms and habits of a training year.  Big goals are great, especially when I make them, but they require a lot of focus and well, a certain amount of suffering.  I can only do those 60-minute threshold sufferfests on the spinner so many times.  So October is the month I cut […]

I like to have one major goal for each riding reason, such as Quadzilla this year and the Endless Mountains 1240k in 2009.  But there are always numerous smaller goals in the back of my mind, personal bests that I think I could better.  I reached a couple of those milestones the past week or […]

The vicious 25 percent section of Fiddlers Elbow Road, originally uploaded by Shane Beake.

This year on Hillier Than Thou, just before the right turn onto Iron Bridge Road at about mile 80, there was a wonderfully seductive word painted on the road in large letters:

B-A-I-L-O-U-T

For a split second, I thought […]

The start of the Hawk Mtn climb, you end up crossing over the (Georgia to Maine) Appalachian Trial, originally uploaded by Shane Beake.

The last couple of weeks before a target event are always tricky. On the one hand, you can’t do much in those two weeks to improve your […]

In the four-season climate of New Jersey, it is natural for outdoor athletes to have peaks and valleys of fitness.  After all, riding on a 25-degree January morning is entirely different than riding on a 75-degree July morning.  I find my fitness on the bike goes through predictable phases.  I usually reach my fitness peak […]