My Titanium donkey, the trusty steed that I'll be riding From Lands End to John O'Groats in three weeks time, looking resplendent in its home habitat - Richmond Park. Three weeks...now there's a thought, not long to go indeed, so as the time ticks by so do the training kilometre's (it's not miles people - get with the times).
348km and 3,338m of climbing completed last week, majority of which was completed over the weekend. I would love to do more during the week, but outside of a very full-time job, it's not really conducive to that want or need, so just have to adapt and maximise the time available. So last week focused more on climbing, and had a sweaty hour every evening on the turbo at home climbing peaks on Zwift. I will say, even though a relatively short effort compared to the hours I will be putting in on a daily basis, by Friday the legs were feeling a little heavy with the workload put in over the previous week. All good for increasing resilience and improve conditioning, which will hopefully make the challenge easier (relatively speaking)...what do they say about train hard...
I do enjoy cycling around Richmond Park, would be even better if the cars would bugger off, but provides a good loop with flats, steep and long inclines and head/tail/cross winds. It is almost exactly 10km, so the goal one day is to get around in under 20 minutes...I'm still a few minutes away from that at the moment, but you need short term goals to remain motivated and focused (especially when you are doing several laps). The deer are just a bonus, they could be anywhere and on more than one occasion just decide to walk across the road in front of you - but they do look quite amusing when they seem like a bunch on heads and antlers.
For those who know me, I like my data as much as the next person...probably a lot more to be fair, so l love looking at the speeds, distance, cadence, etc. but the metrics I am particularly interested in, and currently fascinated by, are all the various power ones. I wont go into too much detail here, as I can already hear some of you yawn, but if you do want to have some information around this I would be more than happy to talk through it...at great length. I will be putting the odd stat into the daily blog whilst on my ride, but I will leave you with one fascinating stat (well, i find it fascinating anyway), and that is around power distribution. I am right footed, and always considered my right leg as the strongest - but apparently when i cycle I favour the left with 55% power compared to 45% on the right. Weirdly even being conscious of it the stats didn't change...oh well, it's looks like my left leg is going to have to carry me over the line.
Have an amazing week.
Comments