Both Dave and myself are very excited about a new challenge we’ve signed up for this year, Deloitte Ride Across Britain. In September, we’ll be cycling the length of Britain in 9 days riding just shy of 1000 miles, from the South Westerly tip of Cornwall to the most North Easterly point in Scotland.
Living on a relativly small island, I’ve always had a desire to see as much of it as possible and riding Land’s End to John O’ Groats or LEJOG, as it’s commonly called is a bit of a bucket list ride as well. I’ve always put off actually doing it because I’m always just too busy to organise it as I wouldn’t even know where to start, plus I mean, how long would it take if you were carrying all your stuff? I’m thinking it would be slowish if I had bags with all my gear and I just don’t have enough time to devote to doing it that way.
Luckily, Deloitte Ride Across Britain organise absolutely everything so all we have to do is turn up and ride! The routes are all sorted, there are feed stations, we don’t need to carry any bags and they’ve even arranged camping for us. Oh, and huge breakfasts and dinners. And massages. See, EVERYTHING!
Starting in Cornwall, we’ll tackle a couple of super hilly days to get things started, pedaling from Land’s End to Okehampton and ascending 7000 feet as we cross Bodmin Moor and skirt Dartmoor. Day two is another tough one as we enter the Quantocks and make our way to Bath via Cheddar Gorge, climbing 6000 feet in our 110 mile ride.
Riding long distances back to back is something I’ve not really done before, other than when I rode London Revolution which worked out at about 230 miles over two days (as I rode to and from the start and finish). I don’t even generally do heaps of long rides as I race mainly Criterium at the moment, which are short, fast, circuit races of around 45 minutes so I do a lot of short, hard, fast, threshold intervals to mimic that kind of riding.
So I’m going to have to take a look at my training plan in the next month or two and figure out how I can make some adjustments without ditching any of the top end tuning sessions that I really need to do throughout the Crit season. I think it will be challenging to try and train for two things that are so totally at the opposite end of the spectrum, actually so much so that I’m not really sure how I’m going to tackle it just yet. As my priority has to be the races, I wonder how I’ll fare with this endurance based challenge?
I’ll let you know how I’m getting on over the next six months. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to manage my training. If you’ve any tips, please leave them in the comments below.