My training for the Yorkshireman has been a bold one: I would spend the winter and spring building power and then the late spring and early summer bringing together the endurance side of things. That meant that if the endurance wasn’t coming together, I would probably find out too late to do anything about it. That suddenly felt very scary when we arrived in May.
Luckily, it has been coming together. I completed the long route of the Tour de Yorkshire earlier this month and on bank holiday Monday I set out with the vague idea of riding somewhere between 160-180km, or shorter if I wasn’t feeling it. That isn’t a great way to structure your training but I had a 100-mile sportive booked in for the weekend after, so I wasn’t too worried about getting the distance done.
I started by meeting Cat. We went for a tour around the World Triathlon Leeds bike course and had a lovely chat. After that, I headed up towards East Keswick, not really knowing where I was going: just setting out with a map and a pocket full of dreams.
I made great process heading out towards York which always makes me suspicious: if you are going faster than you expect, it is often because you are benefiting from a tailwind you haven’t noticed. As soon as I turned back I ended up hitting the ever-present headwind which made it much harder going.
My back was giving me all kind of grief and by the time I hade it to Otley, my legs were fed up. They cried every time we got near any kind of incline. I made it as far as Golden Acre Park before refilling my bidons with coke for some sugary caffeine energy. Finally, at the bottom of Kirkstall Road, I hit the 160km mark (100 miles).
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Tags: cycling
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 30th, 2019 at 11:00 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.