An Oxfordshire road
Training in the past few weeks has been disrupted. A cold before Buxton MTT, then two weeks in New York. For some reason it is much harder to train in New York (not just the roads and drivers) but the general motivation. It’s a combination of factors, but for some reason, I always feel like I’m swimming against the current (or cycling into headwind for want of a better analogy). I think my longest ride in NY was 23 miles. In England, 23 miles is the warm-up before the intervals start.
Fortunately, a quiet few weeks doesn’t matter so much after a good winter’s training. I cycled nearly 1,300 miles in March, which is a lot of miles. It’s probably good to have an easy few weeks every now and then.
In New York, cycling was a struggle, the familiar enthusiasm for cycling ebbed away – on the positive side, you remember there’s more to life to cycling. Another thing about not training is that you remember what it is like to have fresh legs – not tired out and recovering from some hard session – it’s almost a joy to walk up stairs. Still, when you get out of the habit of training, you start to worry about losing the cycling bug.
But as soon as I got back on my own TT bike and went up the Chiltern hills, the rhythm came back and you soon pick up where you left off. I didn’t seem to lose anything by having three weeks off. But, this week I’ve had to hold back a little because the knees felt a little strained after 3 hours of hilly training. Nothing serious, they seem to be getting used to it again. Still I just entered a 100 mile time trial, and that’s enough to get you worried about training volume. Even with 4,000 winter miles, a good cyclist is always worrying about doing enough training.
This Sunday Beacon Mountain Time trial. I hope all the jet lag has evaporated with Matt Bottrill off a few minutes after me.