Met up with Ashley out by Redlands. Today was supposed to be a Zone 2 - 91 to 131 watts day. She’s a powerhouse and didn’t seem to have the patience for my Zone 2 restrictions. I knew that by the time we hit the mountains all bets were off and all I could do was to hope I still had time left on the 4 hour window for this training to use some of descent to bring my average back to at the highest 131. And guess where that number landed? 131👊🏾👍🏾😊👁️ I think she expected me to suck at climbing but the lbs I’ve dropped and the various time duration and intensity intervals have definitely given me preseason climbing abilities! I did pull off a couple miles or so before we reached peak altitude for the turn around and had a couple of sections of Ciabatta bread with vegan Boursin and honey, while i let her go ahead. She got to the turn around while i was about a 1/4 mile back still. The descent was kind of weird in that we had a significant headwind going downhill. She wanted to ride to the right of the rumble strips so I chose to most of the time and held back my speed to make sure she was ok 👌🏾 for the whole descent. I normally target the last vehicle in a line going down hill and sprint to catch it and sit in its draft at 50-60 mph the rest of the way down. So I kept it down to about 30-35 and braked every now nd then to keep her in sight as there was significant side winds in those canyons along with how the motor vehicles caused wind shear. And there was always the possibility of the wind pushing her onto the rumble strips which have taken many a rider. I didn’t know if she had bunny hopping experience? I hopped back and forth when the main lanes were clear. We cruised Redlands a little bit however I didn’t feel that much into that part so I peeled off and headed on back to Riverside after texting her to let her know her know after she took off exploring a route to Sunset. Stopped over on California Ave just before the beginning of the Santa Ana River Trail and had 2 sandwich sized ziplock bags half full of TJ’s Ancient Grains hot breakfast cereal with honey in it and within a mile my inner Dragon 🐉 🔥🐲awakened and suddenly I was doing 22-28 mph until I got off the trail just past Mt Roubidoux. Forgot to mention: I got stung again! Almost same area of the trail.. space between the left eye and ear - bee 🐝 got wedged bet my helmet strap and my jaw bones headset. I managed too flick the bee off as soon as I realized it was stuck. But as I reached he dug the stinger in and it tore off in the skin. I felt for the stinger then flicked it off and set back to warp speed like I did a couple weeks ago as I knew that as long a I was at full warp the venom had no effect. I’m home now and about to hit the shower. We’ll see if my body wants to freak out over this one as badly as it did for the last one!