The Things We Do to Ride . . . .

. . . our bike! (see TT blurb below).

Hello blogland. Since the Brize Norton Triathlon I have been trying to up my endurance training – see previous post! Actually, I was upping the endurance training the week prior to Brize. Hence I have managed to string together some big training weeks and also throw in some longer effort sessions. I did an Open 50 Mile TT last Sunday and grabbed a PB by 4 seconds! I was expecting nearer to 2:10 because of the accumulated fatigue so I was pleased with this. I managed a 20 min run off the bike at close 7:00 mile pace and it actually felt ok. I wanted to run for longer but with no feeding on the bike, I think I would have been nearing bonk land! The ride itself was sub-maximal. This was partly due to the fact that I was carrying a lot of fatigue and partly due to the fact that I wanted to negative split. I achieved the negative split with a first 25 of 1:01:34 and a second 25 of 1:00:31 (by my Garmin so slightly out with official timing). I only really went 100% over the last 4 miles and that made the ride quite enjoyable.

I carried on the week with some long endurance stuff, with 50+ miles on the bike and a swim on Monday. Then a long run Tuesday and a hard swim and evening 10 TT on Wed. I was quite flat on the Wed TT but that was to be expected. I was pleased enough to still average over 25mph. Yesterday was 25+ miles bike and a fast finish run of around an hour. Bring on Saturday for a rest day!

Here’s the weird thing about the TT on Wed evening. I was rushing to get to the start because I have to travel from work at Cambridge. When I got to the HQ I realised that I had forgotten my skinsuit! Doh! I had bike shoes and helmet but nothing to put on inbetween! In the end I blagged my daughters nice M&Co leggings and I found a gillet in my bag. The leggings had to be the most uncomfortable thing that I have ever worn on a bike. And they had nice frilly lacy bits on the bottom. The training value was there but I looked a right plonker! Never mind, I consider myself to have zero street cred anyway!

Next race for me – Speedy Beaver! Best I get my transitions sorted for this spring race! But it is only a training race . . . . . honest!