Day 59

Spent one hour in the gym today.  This week was my last week of easing into my strength workouts, so next week I start lifting heavy weights... we'll see how much that sacks me for my rides.  Even with just a moderate gym session on Tuesday, my legs were feeling pretty heavy last night.  There's a lot of controversy about whether lifting weights is good for cycling, so this might not work... The reasons against it are two-fold: strength training usually leads to weight gain (bad for cycling) and strength training is not specific to cycling, so doing a hard workout on the bike would be even better.  We'll just have to wait and see what happens weight-wise, but I'm hoping to see benefits from working out the stability muscles that don't get used in cycling.  So, in this way I think there's certainly a loss of specificity, but that it's a good thing.  Cycling seems to keep your muscles working in a particular plane, thus neglecting/no using stability muscles.  But, at least based on my limited anatomy knowledge, I think that having weak stability muscles will likely trigger an innate reflex that prevents the main cycling muscles from getting as strong as possible (some sort of golgi tendon reflex type of thing).  So by using strength training to beef up the supporting muscles, I'll be able to convince my body that it's ok to let the other muscles get stronger... or at least that's how I'm picturing it in my head!