First Outdoor Ride of 2009

I took the plunge today and completed my first outdoor ride of 2009. I had to pass up the previous few days of sunny, mild weather because I did not have a bike ready for the road. Saturday, I replaced a tube on my Kona Kula Primo and adjusted the rear disc break to amend some rubbing that was happening between the disc and the break pad. Looking at the weather last night on weatherunderground.com it looked like my only chance for a hypothermic free ride would be today. An arctic cold front is moving down from, well, the arctic and the next few days look to be pretty chilly. Like in the 20's chilly with some wind to boot. The hills are hard enough already without cold arctic wind blowing at ya.
I chose to do a 20 mile loop (I was riding a mountain bike with big knobbys on, so 20 hilly miles is sufficient for a first ride) that brought me out into the hinterlands of Fayette and Wayne. Good, quiet country roads with some good organic decomposition going on, as I rode by a couple of dairy farms with a winter full of manure just now thawing out. This disctinctive smelling decomp reminds me (as if I need reminding, I love it here!) of the rural personality of this land.
I was scheduled (I'm following a CTS training plan) to do several 3 minute zone 5 intervals (he calls them "power intervals." Lots of other coaches despise his naming of already understood techniques, but whether they like him or not, he's good. He's also wicked successful and probable filthy rich, which gives struggling coaches more fuel for their fire) today with specific interval lengths and specific rest periods. This kind of structure is difficult to duplicate on the kinds of roads we have here, so I went with fartlek training instead. Fartlek is Swedish for "speed play." It's perfect for me here because it is unstructured intensity of varying lengths and times. One "interval" may be a 12 second all out sprint, and another a 10 minute steady state effort and anything in between. I attacked every hill I encountered from short, but steep little 10 second out of the saddle sprints to 2-5 minute hills where I went at full VO2 max efforts (even higher than time trial effort. It hurts!) to the half mile and full one mile hills. These longer hills I did at time trial effort, which for me is at a HR between 175-179. To spice it up even more I sprinted DOWN a couple of hills (stay seated going down, unless you have a death wish. I currently don't.) to really turn the peddles over at about 150 rpms . My best out the saddle sprint is 175 rpms. I don't know if that's good or not. I don't sprint enough to really train it. Anyway, you can see I packed a lot in over 20 miles. All said, my legs and lungs felt strong. If I can cut a few pounds, I think I may have good season. It sure would be nice to be at the front for a race or two. I wonder what that feels like?