After work on Friday, I drove out to Galena for a short weekend training camp with about 9-10 other athletes to ride and run in the Galena, IL hills.
View on the way there...
The area is quite beautiful and we stayed in a private home in the Eagle Ridge Territories. Anyone who has been to Galena has heard of this area and knows the area for it's beauty, seclusion and golf courses. Anyone who does cycling or triathlon knows it for its hills!! There are areas where the hills are 17% grade and they're tough. Most of them are short, but some are longer, slow rides up and down.
We didn't train together on Friday night (plus it was an off day for me) so we made dinners and all arrived at different times and got settled.
Saturday morning, we woke up for a group bike check and two hour ride. I think we rode about 20 or so miles in the hills. The slowest I went was 3.6mph and the fastest was 41.6mph!! Consider tooling up a 17% grade hill, but then being able to FLY down one! I love it but some of the other ladies were scared. I feel like the downhills are true rewards for the up!
After our ride, we got back to the house, changed and went to lunch in downtown Galena. Believe it or not, I'd never been to the downtown-- just to the territory last year for the Galena triathlon race itself. The downtown was cute and I would have loved some time to walk around, window shop and experience it, but alas we were 12 people trying to find a place that would take us for lunch and it took some time. We landed at the local brewery which made my no carb diet difficult!! Lunch really wasn't that great and a plate of lettuce just doesn't seem a good 'reward' for all that work.
After lunch, we went back to the house to change and do some strength and stretching orientation for about an hour.
Then the group went to do some hill work for about 35-45 minutes and I went for a run through the golf course for an hour (I had an hour run on my plan). Here's what I saw:
View on the way there...
We didn't train together on Friday night (plus it was an off day for me) so we made dinners and all arrived at different times and got settled.
Saturday morning, we woke up for a group bike check and two hour ride. I think we rode about 20 or so miles in the hills. The slowest I went was 3.6mph and the fastest was 41.6mph!! Consider tooling up a 17% grade hill, but then being able to FLY down one! I love it but some of the other ladies were scared. I feel like the downhills are true rewards for the up!
After our ride, we got back to the house, changed and went to lunch in downtown Galena. Believe it or not, I'd never been to the downtown-- just to the territory last year for the Galena triathlon race itself. The downtown was cute and I would have loved some time to walk around, window shop and experience it, but alas we were 12 people trying to find a place that would take us for lunch and it took some time. We landed at the local brewery which made my no carb diet difficult!! Lunch really wasn't that great and a plate of lettuce just doesn't seem a good 'reward' for all that work.
After lunch, we went back to the house to change and do some strength and stretching orientation for about an hour.
Then the group went to do some hill work for about 35-45 minutes and I went for a run through the golf course for an hour (I had an hour run on my plan). Here's what I saw:
After our runs, many of the gals jumped in the hot tub (I abstained- my body does better after workouts with ice baths rather than hot water) and then we all cleaned up and rested and had a group BBQ meal for dinner. I may have been the first to bed (I took advantage of uninterrupted sleep out in the country!!) and we were up and at it again on Sunday.
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