Feeling Like an Ex-Triathlete!

Ahhh, the days tick by and still no running and not much swimming. As the results from recent races come in, I feel very much like an ex-triathlete. Still, I can appreciate some of the performances out there in tri-land. Of note are:

Westy’s biking improvements – he is flying!

Mat’s comeback – very nice to see.

Jase Walkley’s bubbling ability – expect to see him put a fast race together soon.
Some returning triathletes to watch – Daz Cole, Dom Sanderson, Al Hadnett, JC (still fast when crashing his bike!).

The huge improvement of ‘no longer that Big Bob Arthur’.

Daz Sharpe managing to maintain enthusiasm to race, despite illness seemingly wrecking every attempt to put a decent race together.

My bike training has continued. When I returned from France I took a couple of days rest to get over the journey – I was pooped! On Saturday I took the single speed out and did an hour and a half hill session on a circuit near Wyton. The hills round here are not up to much, especially after riding in the Alps! However, I thought that some short flat out efforts may compliment the long climbs of France quite well. I completed 9 short efforts on 3 different hills. The efforts really were flat out and timed between 1 min 20 sec and 1 min 45 sec for the longer hill. I found this hard but was quite strong.

I rested again on Sunday and then rode an hour easy early on Monday morning and completed a full on turbo effort session in the evening:

Warm up
4 x 6 mins as 4 mins at 330W then accelerate through to 380W for the final 2 mins of the rep.
Finish with 6 min alternating 300W for 1 min, 330W for 1 min.
This was a good session and pretty much blew my legs off.

Tuesday: short spins on the TT bike whilst playing with my position. Hour steady on TT bike.

This evening I have the club TT. It’s a 15 miler that I have not done before, so that should be fun. The weather looks a bit grim though. Talking of grim weather, I was looking forward to my first 25 TT on Sunday. However, the forecast for much of the UK is heavy rain and low temperatures. I will have to see what transpires.

Looking back at some of my rides in France, I have managed to get some information on the climbs. Interesting to note that the climb I rated as the hardest was used in the tour in 2004 and is a 1st Cat climb – that’s why it hurt! As I thought, some of the other climbs were more sedate (apart from the D'Arpetez that hurt!), but still very enjoyable. Check out some profile info below:





The pics don't reproduce too well but the red is a gradient of over 10%, yellow somewhere between 7 - 10 %, blue between 4 - 7%, green between 0 - 4%. The top profile is the Col De Forclaz (a lot of yellow and red!). My plan is to return to this climb and do a mountain TT. . . . . now there's a fun time to be had!