2021 Festive 500 - Day 6

 

One more badge done!

• Day 6: December 29
• Target: 60km
• Achieved: 25+36.1 = 61.1 km
• Method: Not looking enthusiastically at yet another 2+ hr grind on the flats, I noticed that Makuri was in the rotation (it's been there all week, I've just been distracted). I needed the badge for Neokyo All-Nighter, which is a mostly flat route with a climb to the rooftops at the end. Decided to start there and earned the badge XP.  From there, I pondered joining the Diesel crew for some Pace Partner time but my legs simply weren't up to the task. I fell back to the flats and got to work grinding.
• Nutrition: 1 bottle of Skratch Labs Orange, 1 Hammer Gel, 1 Clif bar. Skratch Labs arrived from Amazon, so decided to give it a shot.
• Good: The HRM finally worked! I now have a spare, but didn't need it. 
• Sidebar - The problem with my Garmin HRM Dual is that apparently enough sweat will saturate the strap and cause the electrodes in the brain unit to stop reading.  I cut the strap and removed 1/4 inch of material behind the brain unit and it worked flawlessly past the 1hr mark for the first time in several weeks. 
• Bad: Mentally, dividing today into two different routes didn't work as well as I'd hoped.  It felt good to finish the first 25k and earn the badge. It really (really) sucked to re-queue up on another map and start over.  Yes, it was kinda new and novel, and I felt smug for the first 10 minutes or so, but 15 or 30 minutes after I got started it felt like a huge setback. 
• Ugly: My legs are super mega tired. You can see in the screenshot that my upper limit in the workout mode is 160 watts.  Today at various points I started feeling the 160 watt segments when a day or two ago the segment differences were invisible to me (other than a blip on the HRM chart - when it worked!)