Training objective: Hill work this weekend. Coach says hills needs to be done with very hard effort and with power on hard rides, not intervals and only now and then. He says what works best is to get a lap of 3-5 km's with a very big hill in it and do laps for 1-2 hours at a hard tempo and then on the hill, with very hard effort on the last half of hill and the cadence at 70-80 rpm's. The idea is to get the hill in every 10-15 minutes. After last weekend's race, I discovered that if I stay wheels side down, not many guys go faster on the downhill and I can usually catch up on the flats. So, I figured it would be good to focus on improving my climbing (which means building power and stamina), thus the training objective my coach and I have come up for this training ride. I've been fighting some sort of horrible gastro infection the last 2.5 days, so feeling quite weak and dehydrated - compounded by the poor sleep that comes with getting up multiple times during the night. It made it very difficult to get the motivated to get out there today, but I figure if I'm going to get stronger both mentally and physically, I've got to push when my mind and body are telling me they least want to... that's really going to help with the 36ONE, which frankly, is going to be an 80% mental game. It was a tough one and I gave it the whole way, but decided to only do an hour. This loop might be a bit long for this exercise - or perhaps it would be better if I did it for 2 hours to get two good attacks of the big Greenhaven hill.