Monday 19 January 2009

Not So Great Ride

After my wonderful run last week I came down to earth with a bump at the weekend when I went out on the bike. I went out for my normal ride of a loop around last years Ironman course and I seemed to be really slow. To be honest I wasn't really sure how much slower I was while I was riding, I just knew it seemed slower. The road was wet and for some reason I felt very nervous on all the descents, even more than usual. But I also felt slow on the flats and up-hill parts as well.

After finally getting home and checking the figures I saw I was over 15 minutes slower on a ride that previously took me around 3:20. Some of that was down to my slow descending but a lot of it was just down to me being slow. The worrying part is that I was nowhere near as fast as I wanted to be before and I have gone backwards.

Looking back over my workouts in SportTracks I can see part of the problem. It has been over weeks, actually months, since I have been for a long ride. I have been doing workouts on the turbo trainer and commuting through London but I haven't done anything over 2 hours for ages. The lack of time on the road also explains a certain amount of my nervousness while cornering and descending. At the end of the ride I was also completely wiped out and felt really tired for the rest of the day.

On another note I also had really bad tyre trouble. On the ride my back tyre punctured, which I repaired and used for the rest of the ride. That evening I drove my car to the garage to get petrol for my Monday morning drive to London and my car tyre punctured. So I changed that in the dark. Then I checked my bike tyre that punctured earlier and noticed that the tread was coming away from the body of the tyre in a couple of places. So I binned the tyre and put on a spare that I had knocking around. As I was putting the wheel back on the bike I heard a hissing noise and realised my previous repair had come loose. So the inner tube, which had a few repairs, joined the tyre in the bin and I popped in a new one. By this point most of my precious evening with the family had been wasted and I was in a really grumpy mood. Oh well, things can only get better, I told myself.

Except I got up at 04:30 this morning for my Monday drive to London and the rain was hammering down. So things didn't get better.

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