Update: 2 wks...
Weight: 12st 12.8. BMI: 25.6. Body Fat: 18.9%. Body Water: 55.9%.
Wk 03 Training: Hours: 9:08. Bike: 232.0k. Work: 6,266 KCal.
Just 2 week to go. Wow.
Weight… Up a smidgen (0.4lbs). With my propensity to put on weight if I take my foot off the training ‘gas’ I need to be very careful in the last fortnight. I certainly want to be 12 stone something… And that’s when I arrive on the start line, after I having completed a few days of carbo-loading. Exactly. Soup for lunch. Gotta watch the weight!!
Training… What a terrible week’s training. Mon > Rest day. Tue > None. Wed > None. Thur > None. Fri > None. See where this was going… Downhill. Fast.
Now the excuses (of sorts). Tuesday & Wednesday – I was a little bit busy and a little bit lazy. Thursday – Oh dear. Mentally all prepared for an afternoon ride. Until I burnt my hand on the soup saucepan and spent the rest if the day icing it. (Cycling with one hand in a bucket of icy water is not recommended). Friday – Tickets to the Twenty20 cricket (England v W.I.) Some decent bowling (oh mi god, how fast do they sling it down !!!) and a good batting display, particularly by Owais Shah saw England home.
That left the weekend to try and recover some sort of training routine to my couch-potato lifestyle. The weather forecast was wet. The wife took a look at the window and said it would be fine. An hour later I’m cycling through the London suburbs to get to the hills of Surrey and of course it’s teeming down with rain. Then MM has a puncture – it takes sixteen minutes to change it (in the rain). We’re off. But not for long. MM’s second puncture – this time just eleven minutes to change it (yup, it’s still raining). Now were making progress. When my rear wheel decides to go sideways and I’m sliding across the tarmac. It is one of those days. Fortunately the rest of the day was incident free. Perhaps due to the fact I had now lost all confidence in my tyres to grip wet tarmac. This meant slowing for corners and heavy on the brakes on descents. It was all a bit passive. So we headed for a monster hill – regarded as the toughest in the Surrey Hills – Horse Block Hollow. The drag is approx 3k long, but it’s the last kilometre that hurts – it averages 11.4% and max’s out at an eye watering 21%. Taken at pace this’ll have your heart beating through your chest and your thighs screaming for mercy. Just what was needed – 11minutes of fury made my heart rate soar to 177bpm. Now we just had to cycle the 50km home…
Sunday – I had a lunch appointment. Tough. Just means an early start. Met up with a couple of other Kingston Wheelers looking for an early hilly ride. You could say they put me through my paces as we once again hit the up and down stuff of the Surrey Hills. A little over 4hrs ride time fitted in before lunch. That’s more like it.
So, after four pathetic days I managed to fit in 9 hours over the weekend. Better.
A fortnight today and I’ll be in the Pyrenees doing the Etape – trying to increase the distance between me and the broom wagon!! It really isn’t long now – most of the training is behind me and I am now officially starting my taper proper. Although a look at the graph (below) might well make people conclude that maybe I started it last week. So, this coming week, the plan is for a few hard sessions at the start of the week, rest later in the week and then the club run on Sunday for my last long outing before the alps.
Wk 03 Training: Hours: 9:08. Bike: 232.0k. Work: 6,266 KCal.
Just 2 week to go. Wow.
Weight… Up a smidgen (0.4lbs). With my propensity to put on weight if I take my foot off the training ‘gas’ I need to be very careful in the last fortnight. I certainly want to be 12 stone something… And that’s when I arrive on the start line, after I having completed a few days of carbo-loading. Exactly. Soup for lunch. Gotta watch the weight!!
Training… What a terrible week’s training. Mon > Rest day. Tue > None. Wed > None. Thur > None. Fri > None. See where this was going… Downhill. Fast.
Now the excuses (of sorts). Tuesday & Wednesday – I was a little bit busy and a little bit lazy. Thursday – Oh dear. Mentally all prepared for an afternoon ride. Until I burnt my hand on the soup saucepan and spent the rest if the day icing it. (Cycling with one hand in a bucket of icy water is not recommended). Friday – Tickets to the Twenty20 cricket (England v W.I.) Some decent bowling (oh mi god, how fast do they sling it down !!!) and a good batting display, particularly by Owais Shah saw England home.
That left the weekend to try and recover some sort of training routine to my couch-potato lifestyle. The weather forecast was wet. The wife took a look at the window and said it would be fine. An hour later I’m cycling through the London suburbs to get to the hills of Surrey and of course it’s teeming down with rain. Then MM has a puncture – it takes sixteen minutes to change it (in the rain). We’re off. But not for long. MM’s second puncture – this time just eleven minutes to change it (yup, it’s still raining). Now were making progress. When my rear wheel decides to go sideways and I’m sliding across the tarmac. It is one of those days. Fortunately the rest of the day was incident free. Perhaps due to the fact I had now lost all confidence in my tyres to grip wet tarmac. This meant slowing for corners and heavy on the brakes on descents. It was all a bit passive. So we headed for a monster hill – regarded as the toughest in the Surrey Hills – Horse Block Hollow. The drag is approx 3k long, but it’s the last kilometre that hurts – it averages 11.4% and max’s out at an eye watering 21%. Taken at pace this’ll have your heart beating through your chest and your thighs screaming for mercy. Just what was needed – 11minutes of fury made my heart rate soar to 177bpm. Now we just had to cycle the 50km home…
Sunday – I had a lunch appointment. Tough. Just means an early start. Met up with a couple of other Kingston Wheelers looking for an early hilly ride. You could say they put me through my paces as we once again hit the up and down stuff of the Surrey Hills. A little over 4hrs ride time fitted in before lunch. That’s more like it.
So, after four pathetic days I managed to fit in 9 hours over the weekend. Better.
A fortnight today and I’ll be in the Pyrenees doing the Etape – trying to increase the distance between me and the broom wagon!! It really isn’t long now – most of the training is behind me and I am now officially starting my taper proper. Although a look at the graph (below) might well make people conclude that maybe I started it last week. So, this coming week, the plan is for a few hard sessions at the start of the week, rest later in the week and then the club run on Sunday for my last long outing before the alps.
Posted by Richard Allen
2 Comments:
where did only 2 weeks come from...
surely there is another 10 left. amazing job to keep up the pressure under the circumstances!
dont dream about being chased by massive evil dust carts. cheers, Ben
Time has flown by since I started in earnest on 1st Jan...
My etape coundown clock is showing just 13 days 11 hrs. And counting...
In some ways I wish I had 10 more weeks to go. In others I just want to get on and tackle it. Man 'o' Mountain
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