Happy holidays

I had an absolute blast yesterday. It's been a good few weeks since I have got out for a long ride and with the weather perking up a bit, the kids at school and me on holiday I found myself with a couple of hours to spare. I was a bit worried about it because I have only been doing my commute rides with a turbo session once per week doing some threshold intervals so I felt that I had probably lost some aerobic endurance over the last month. During my commute rides I have been working very hard as well, at a rough guess I would say that I try to go at slightly sub-olympic distance pace, so definitely not dawdling, but at only 20 minutes in duration it seemed that this would not really be enough to maintain my bike fitness. I was only planning to do 2 hours but I soon found myself enjoying the hills around Dorking, sprinting up  them and revelling in the quiet and, for once dry roads that allowed me to stay off the brakes on the descents. The only problem was that I suddenly found myself still on the wrong side of Dorking and I was meant to be at home in 40 minutes time so I ended up getting my head down and time trialling home. 3 hours on the watch :-) I had only taken water with me as I intend to limit my calorie intake during these rides in order to stop me relying on sports drinks to see me to the end of the session and promote fat burning. I was pleased that I felt pretty fresh and strong at the end despite the lack of bike volume.
Swimming is improving and becoming more regular (couldn't really have become any more irregular!) I did my first 400m tt in a very long time (6.39 :-/ plenty of room for improvement) and this morning I completed another 1 hour set at Hampton. I am purely focussing on the catch phase and stroke length at the moment, slowing everything down and extending my  stroke as much as possible without over-gliding. I am going to do one more 400m tt as part of the #winterswim program and see if I can duck under 6.30 in the next 2 weeks.
Running's been 4 x 30 minute runs last week and will be much the same this week. Can't see me doing any speedwork for quite a while.