Man Flu

Training time at the weekends has been limited recently but this weekend I managed a couple of good sessions. On Saturday I did an hour on the bike followed by a quick run. Then on Sunday I rode over to Sherborne and did a lap of the Ironman course. I did have some minor navigational issues on the back part of the Ironman course, I was on course the whole way but for some parts I wasn't sure, but it was a good week. The only real issue I had was dehydration due to the amount of fluid I was losing through my nose.

Yes, I have had a bout of man flu and for the whole ride on Sunday I had a streaming nose. Oddly, I felt absolutely fine and it was just irritating. By the end of Sunday I was starting to feel more under the weather though and due to coughing, spluttering and difficulty breathing found it really hard to sleep that night. Monday mornings I am always up early to drive up to London for the week, after a very short night of broken sleep it was not much fun.

I am starting to feel better now but have not done any proper training so far this week, just my normal bike rides to work and back. My plan is to skip long run day tomorrow as well, possibly a little lazy but I am still not right and long run day really takes it out of me when I am 100%.

One thing I did do yesterday though was spend some time cleaning my bike, giving special attention to my drive train which was totally black. I took the chain off and sprayed it with degreaser to give it a good clean. It certainly wasn't perfect and there was still a lot of gunk in the nooks and crannies of the chain but it looked a lot better. So you can imagine my dissapointment after spending ages getting mucky when everything was really noisy cycling to work and back this today. When I got home I upended the bike to try and figure out where the noise was coming from. My first guess was that the bearings on one of the jockey wheels on the derailleur had failed as one of them seemed a bit dodgy when I was cleaning it.

A quick inspection revealled that, as usual, the problem was me. When I threaded the chain back through the derailleur I had put it on the wrong side of a guide lug between the two jockey wheels. So I cycled all the way to work and back with the chain running over this lug, I made quite good time as well. Idiot. Oh well, at least it was easy to fix and it should be running ultra smooth tomorrow.