Climb. Descend. Repeat.

During the week, I've been dutifully working out on my own, either attending Spinning class, lifting weights, or running with my buddies. But, the cycling coaches strongly encourage us to attend a mid-week session on "hill repeats", to make us stronger for climbing.

The formula is simple: find a hill with a good ~1 mile climb, ride up to the top and return, and repeat several times. Well finally I attended my first hill repeat session, on Mt. Eden Road in Saratoga. Not only was it at 7am, but just my luck, it was lightly raining for my debut!

I was feeling kind of lost since I'd never met for this before, but finally I found our knowledgable leader, Vijay, and he showed me the way. When we arrived at the base of the hill, we found another teammate, Audrey, already there and having completed a couple of repetitions already. AND, she had rode over from home. Tough chick! :-)

The climbing was perfectly hard: not painful, but challenging and long. Vijay led us through the paces, mixing it up by climbing in different gears and cadences. I usually like to descend fast, but I was spooked by the rain and wet roads and took the curves pretty slow. I thought Vijay said we were finished after 3-4 climbs (I've lost count!), but he twisted our arms with "just one more" so we ended up doing 5-6 rounds.

Here's our course map, below. It's nice -- not much traffic, pretty, and peaceful. I can even attest that it's nice in the rain. ;-)