Recovery ride in pictures + training update

My quasi-taper has started, and I say quasi-taper because this is no prolonged, multi-week affair. Instead, the twin goals are to arrive at the start of Cali 70.3 (1) rested yet (2) sharp. There is no "peak fitness", at least in the sense of some sudden jump in fitness, that results from a taper (at least as I understand things). So, resting means reducing volume and/or intensity, but sufficient "rest" can be obtained in just a short time (as in at most a few days). Being sharp basically means giving the body some race-pace efforts during the rest period so that the body doesn't say, "Hey, what are you doing to me?" come race day. I don't mean to imply that I haven't been doing race-paced efforts for the past few weeks -- I certainly have -- just that these efforts continue during the rest period not with the intent of eliciting adaptations in the body but instead to retain any prior adaptions. Just in case my earlier disclaimer didn't get the point across, this is just my understanding of things that have seemingly worked before. Hopefully I have hedged enough in my taper description. (Anyhow, additional detail is provided below.)

With tapering in mind, today I did an easy ride and a hard swim. Once again, it was a cloudless day, this time with a temp around 70 degrees. I kept my HR low (circa 115 bpm) and enjoyed the ride aboard my road/cross bike:


This shot was taken a mile or so from my place of living. Notice the lack of snow? What's surprising is that on Friday about eight inches of snow fell. It's almost all gone, and the ground is nearly completely dry.


One nice thing about Denver is that it has an active culture. Lots of people were out enjoying the nice day:

(Some degree of zooming may be required to see the ten or so folks out walking/cycling/jogging.)

I was headed to Cherry Creek State Park, my go to venue when riding out my door instead of driving to do a ride. To get there I have to climb over a dam, which is visible as the snow-covered wall in the background of this photo:


Once again, I have failed to capture the mountains' grandiosity. Please be assured that the mountains really are much more impressive than this photo would have you believe (even from this vantage):


This little hill is the nemesis of my HR cap on recovery rides to CCSP. Right after moving to Denver and riding out to the park I had to breath quite hard to climb this little sucker:


Again, some of the vistas -- actually, strike out vistas, insert panoramas therefor (compare the definitions and you'll understand why)-- are really quite impressive but that all gets lost with my poor photography. Here there's a nice view of a reservoir, a town (Littleton? The tech center?), and finally the mountains:


There is a remote control airplane field (RC airport?) in CCSP. In addition to evincing the lack of clouds in the sky today, this photo shows one of the planes being flown remotely. On nice days there are typically multiple planes, and they're pretty cool to watch while riding by:


Finally, one of the many mini waterfalls along Cherry Creek. I captured this one with an oh-so-impressive over the shoulder shot while riding:


There are a bunch of great triathlon/food blogs with recipes and photos of tasty and nutritious looking meals. Here is my contribution:

Stacey and I call this apple medley, and IIRC we got the recipe from one of the paleo diet books. Is it cheating to post a recipe that I didn't creat? Oh well. We typically use 3 apples, 2 carrots, a large handful of pecans (almonds work too), some raisins, and cinnamon to make two servings. Delicious.

As far as the training update goes, on Saturday I planned a hard ride as follows:
1 min at 350 W
2 min at 325 W
3 min at 300 W
4 min at 285 W
5 min at 270 W
6 min at 260 W
7 min at 250 W
8 min at 245 W
9 min at 240 W
10 min at 230 W
and back down the ladder to 1 min, with 1-3 minutes rest between (longer rests for the longer reps). Well, Stacey has been sick and so I'm worried about catching something right before Cali 70.3. My power to HR ratio was not good during the ride, so I bailed after the 10 min effort instead of going back down to 1 min. This ride should be sufficient to keep me sharp even though I cut it short to err on the side of rest.

The next day my workouts included an easy ride, an easy swim, and a run with some race paced efforts. I did 5 miles at 6:00/mile with a minute rest between (the rest was just to keep things interesting since I did the workout on a treadmill). Again, one semi-hard workout will keep me sharp without requiring much rest to recover from.