Humble brag

 First ever Strava KOM. #justsayin’.

Life in the old dog yet. 

Farewell, for now, faithful friend

 Last Monday, I met up with Simon and Dale for a relaxed spin. It was the first time that the three of us had been able to meet up and I was really looking forward to catching up with them both. Simon and I had met up before, but the plan was to do a couple of hours as a three up, before meeting a couple of other friends for a coffee and some hot cross buns.  It should have been the perfect social ride but it ended up being bloody horrible. 

Within ten minutes, I could tell that my Van Nic was not happy. The whole transmission felt graunchy and gritty;  the gears were not indexing properly and it felt like the bike was eating itself. I knew that my chain was on the way out but I had really let things get pretty bad. As Dale said to me, after the second time I had almost been pitched over the bars by the chain jumping when I got out the saddle to push down harder on the pedals, ‘I thought that as a DT teacher, your bikes should be really well maintained?’ This is true and while I can tackle the vast majority of bicycle maintenance issues myself, I’m quite lazy at actually doing them when I need to.  It got so bad, that for the first time in my cycling life, I had to walk up Whitedown and suffer the pitying stares from the other riders who were tackling this nasty little climb. Oh the shame of it. 

After a strip down of the chainset and sprockets, it was obvious that the whole lot needed replacing, but the seat post is also firmly stuck inside the frame, so after a vicious couple of minutes wielding Allen keys, cable cutters and spanners, the whole bike was stripped down. 

I can’t afford a new bike so I have decided to give my Euros a new lease of life. In the 11 years I have had her, she’s had more wheelsets and chainsets than I can count, and at least two sets of brakes and shifters, but everything else is pretty much as I bought her. The bars, stem and seatpost are original Van Nic branded components, but also heavy alloy ones and my forks are looking very second hand. I’m not sure that I should be riding on them at all as the bearing surface looked completely shot to bits. So my plan is to replace all of these items with new lightweight carbon components and make her a bit more racey. I’ve found a chap that can remove my seat post so I’m currently sorting out packing up the frame to be posted oop north. I’m also going to remove all of the old and torn decals on the frame and maybe purchase some new ones. Hopefully, in a week or two, I’ll have a ‘new’ lightweight road bike. For the foreseeable future, everything will be on the TT bike. 

I absolutely love my Euros. Strava has us at riding 24,000 miles together, but I actually think it’s closer to 30k. My body has become firmly welded into position on her and I will never part with her. It’s time to give the old girl a new lease of life. 

Head back in the game

So far this year,  I’ve been training fairly consistently. A mix of Zwift, TrainerRoad sessions on the turbo and some social longer rides with Simon, in the Surrey hills. The big thing I’ve been noticing is my need to spend more time recovering from sessions. There are times when I just don’t know how my legs are going to react. Take this morning, for example. I was meant to do a 5x7 minute TR interval session at 105%ftp, which at the moment would make each interval around 300 watts. A hard session, but nothing to get my knickers in a twist about. As it was, I barely made it through the warm up and bailed almost immediately in the first interval. I just didn’t have it in my legs, and even the gentle spin on Zwift that I did instead, was quite hard even though I was spinning at watts that had me barely breathing. 

These days happen, and happen more frequently than they used to, but it’s making me question whether lots of structure in my training is worth it? I’m starting to think it’s best that I just hop on my bike and see how I am, before deciding whether it is a day for a hard session or not. It can be demoralising to have a session planned and then not be able to get anywhere near accomplishing it.  

Along with this, one of the other tweaks that I have made to my training is that I am doing less intensity and more steady, easy riding. This is again to increase volume without wiping me out all the time. Quite a bit of this has been on Zwift where I have been riding steady for around 90 minutes, burning fat and trying to get my weight back to around 70kgs. I’ve made good progress so far, coming down from 74kgs to 71, so I must be doing something right.  

I’m also tinkering with my kit. I’ve bought a new Giro Aerohead helmet and some new bars to get my front end into a faster position and I’ve started the process of trying to get myself comfortable and familiar with this. In my first outing of the year on the TT  bike it felt faster but only time will tell. 

All of this is to actually do some time trialling and I’ve entered a few events. There’s a couple of Sporting TTs coming up but the biggie will be the Breckland 12 hour in August. It would be good to add on some miles to my 246 mile ride a few years ago.