English
2009 Starts now
There may be another month left to 2008, but as far as I am concerned 2009 starts right now. I’ve had a couple of weeks off the bike and while it was nice in a way to chill out I really missed riding a bike. The time off was needed to allow my body to physically and mentally recover after a long year, but now I’m refreshed and really looking forward to the year ahead.
The last week has been spent doing a bit of everything, just getting back into the routine of training and it has been quite a busy and painful week.
I’ve not done many long rides (3 hours+) and virtually no running or core work since Dusk ‘til Dawn, so it is all a bit of a shock to the system. I’ve spent the whole week with soreness in my legs after doing a short run and I’ve felt exhausted after tough 3 hour rides, something that didn’t phase me at all during the season. But I do enjoy the pain and soreness in a masochistic kind of way, because I know that the more suffering I go through now, the stronger it will make me and the faster I will be come summer. The hardest part is balancing training and recovery and its something many people get wrong.
I’ve had some really brilliant rides over the past week; the weather here has been mostly dry and really cold, just how I like it! I did a 3 hour mountain bike ride in the local forest in sub zero temperatures and my gears were frozen solid for almost the entire ride. I would have been OK if it had frozen in a good gear, but trying to ride steep climbs in the big ring is never going to happen! Perhaps I could call it low-cadence power training, which seems to be the in-thing at the moment!
Last Sunday was spent down in Portsmouth riding with some of the guys from Wiggle. It was the first time I’d ridden in the area, riding around QE Park and the South Downs. It was a really fun, muddy ride and a good test for my newly single-speeded Focus Raven. I’ve been riding a single speed for years and I love the simplicity of it and the mentality needed to ride one. You can’t sit back, click through a load of gears and spin up a hill, every climb must be attacked or you end up walking.
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This week is set to be pretty busy, with some good sessions planned. I’m also getting some performance testing done, to set down some benchmarks to see what shape I am in and where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I’ll then get re-tested at regular times during the year, so I can see exactly how and where I am improving. I’ve always taken my training seriously, but this will be the first year that I am going to such lengths.