Dec 15, 2011
So I have been training again for a few months now. I finished my season at the end of September, my legs were just fried. I went with a few of the guys from my team this year (Team Qoroz) to the Nurnberg 24 hour bike race in the middle of August. It was 4 man teams, 1 lap each. The laps took about 50 minutes and were very rolling. One section had a 5km climb. We managed to win against thousands of competitors doing 31 laps. This was one of the highlights of my season, but at the same time it finished my season. As I had never done anything like this before in my life it just took everything out of me and took me a month to recover from it. Having only 1 hour’s sleep in 36 hours. Riding your bike at 2 o’clock in the morning with only your lights and other people’s lights to use as vision. It was an unbelievable experience and worth every bit of the lack of form at the end of the season. So after this I continued until the end of September. My last ride of the season wasn’t exactly an easy one. I had agreed at work (Tesco) to do a 100 mile ride on the rollers for Tesco’s charity of the year Alzheimer’s society. I set up my rollers in the entrance to the store and then set off. It was always going to be a tough ride, I did 70 miles a year earlier for children in need and raised 1000 pounds. That was hard enough. But this time I had really tired from a long season. It got worse when it turned out to be one of the hottest days September had seen. At the 70 mile mark I was really struggling from the heat, having got through about 8 bottles of water. I started wobbling from side to side and losing concentration. But nothing was going to stop me from finishing the challenge as it was for such a good cause. I managed to finish it in 4 and a half hours and raised 500 pounds so far. After this I had 2 weeks off my bike completely.
Now I’m training and it’s that time of the year again. The cold winter months where it’s really important to get as many base miles as you can in. You go to bed saying that when you wake up you’re going to try and get a big ride in before you have to go to work. But then when you wake up, you look outside and it’s cold, wet and miserable. The last thing you want to do is go out in that weather. So you say to yourself maybe the turbo. But then when you get into your kit, it’s all of a sudden a completely different mind-set. You start thinking about all the good things that happened in the season this year. What you can achieve next year if you keep training over winter. I already have a lot of motivation this year, as I want to see how far I can really get. But when I signed for Primal Europe and they told me about their plans for next year it motivated me even more. All the time receiving emails about what they plan to race and all the new amazing sponsors that keep being named. It keeps giving you more and more motivation. Then all of a sudden you look outside and it doesn’t seem quite as bad. The rain doesn’t look anywhere near as bad and you can hardly feel the cold. I have struggled with motivation over winter in the past. I’m always looking forward to racing season, but have never put enough into winter training. I’m really looking forward to meeting and racing with all the guys from Primal Europe and getting my new kit to ride in. But right now I’m just concentrating on getting the quality winter base miles in and trying not to eat too much over Christmas.
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