Day#16
The day after Mid Devon CC’s ten mile hilly time trial, it was back to the velopark for another interval session, this time on my new Charge track bike which I was dying to ride! I’ve not been riding fixed gear or track much recently – really my road and mountain bikes are just better suited to the terrain where I live – so I was keen to have a shred.
But stoked as I was to ride my new track bike, my legs weren’t too keen to cooperate, firstly because I’d smashed out a time trial the previous evening and secondly because I’ve turned into a wuss through riding too spinny a gear on my road bike. I always complete a twenty minute warm up before I do any training (I’ll tell you about that in another post) and I was actually finding it quite hard to push through so I was quite worried that I wouldn’t be able to complete the 45 minute interval session in its entirety. My legs felt very heavy and I felt exhausted after little sleep the night before.
Determined to at least give it a go, I sprinted off for my first 12 minute Zone 4 interval and just kept turning those pedals with an eye on the Garmin to make sure I stayed in the zone. It was really tough, but I managed to motivate myself by telling myself ‘you chose to be here,’ ‘you’ve been looking forward to this,’ and ‘how would you feel if you skipped this session?’ I also mentally ticked off periods of three minutes, thinking ‘you’ve done a quarter,’ ‘you’ve done a half,’ etc etc…
Once the first 12 minutes were up, I had a couple of minutes to recover before starting again, and this time round my motivation to continue was the fact the first 12 minutes would have been for nothing if I gave up. Many, many times I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this,’ and had to remind myself ‘you ARE doing this!’ Once it was over I felt really proud of myself!
Day #17
A rest day in theory, but in reality, moving house and a six hour drive to Sheffield. Ugh
Day #18
On Sunday, Dave and I headed over to Bakewell to meet up with our pals from Bikmo and ride the 55 mile route of Eroica Britannia. It looked like it was going to absolutely bucket it down, but by a stroke of luck we got a near enough dry day of fun. Read my write up over on the Brooks blog.
Day #20
Today! I’m up in the Peak District for a week (or thereabouts) and James from High Rise Coaching has sent over a few workouts I can do out on the road, the aim being to build in some strength and power. Today’s session consisted of some extremely short hill sprints in a very heavy gear, so I duly completed was he prescribed and then added in a few more for good measure. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I can struggle to stick with what I’m meant to be doing, and nearly always want to do more and skip rest days and today was no exception. It actually just felt a bit easy and like it wasn’t really doing anything, which leads me to believe that either I’m got stronger over the last fortnight or I wasn’t doing it properly. Cue: anxiety over the fact I’ve not trained hard enough today and it’s been wasted.