Saturday Training

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Back on the road again, the weather is once again truly dreadful, very windy and also raining in the later stages of the ride. This was a far cry from stage one of the TdF today which was dry though windy and was won by Alejandro Valverde in a fantastic uphill sprint finish.

Neil and John were going out today for 70+ "undulating" miles so decided to give it a go and see how I fared, got to try to get back into things at some point, or pack up completely. In the end it went Ok, though I should have turned for home earlier as I didn't really have the training in my legs to go out and ride that sort of distance (80 miles) at what was a fairly brisk pace for me at this stage. Apart from my lack of recent training the last 2 heavy days of manual work garden clearing will have taken their toll but overall I was happy with my first ride for 3 weeks, which included a cafe stop. Today's ride was a pretty up and down affair with no real periods of long steady efforts and this is reflected in quite a high VI of 1.3, not a ride it was easy to really settle in to but I'm glad to be back on the move.

I'm now going to start rebuilding over the next few weeks concentrating hard on rest and recovery so I'll not be doing the usual long ride of the week tomorrow, as far as I'm concerned I've done that today and in any event the forecast is for continuing heavy rain. I'm just really glad to have got a lot of the garden clearance work done over the last 2 days, it would have been just hopeless today.

So, I'm back in the saddle and restarting training, based on today's ride I made exactly the right decision not to ride La Marmotte, I just don't have enough recent training under my belt, it will be there another year, and so will I.
[Uploaded 05/07/2008 16:50:48]