My last blog nearly exactly a year ago was looking ahead to the 2020 season and setting out some targets for the year. Needless to say the year didn’t pan out quite how I was expecting or hoping.
I managed one race all year the weekend before the first lockdown, The Morton Morrel Duathlon which I won last year. It was a cold and wet day, the rain started well before the race began and didn’t stop until well after it finished. There were 3 sets of traffic lights in quick succession on the bike course and I got stopped at all 3 and never really got going again. My heartrate dropped and with it my body temperature. When I got back to transition I made a tough call to pull out. I had lost colour and was shivering with the cold. I felt like there was no point in pushing on when there were bigger races to come…
As the year went on and with each race that got cancelled or pushed back until 2021 my motivation went as well. I found it very hard to motivate myself to push on with training with no goal in sight. I was still keeping myself fit getting runs and bike rides in but there was no cutting edge. Whilst my fitness was still there the speed wasn’t.
Looking ahead to 2021 and hoping that we can get back to racing I felt like I needed to get some base training which seemed to perfectly coincide with the rapha 500 and then followed up with the Tour De Zwift.
I made a plan to complete the Rapha 500 over the course of the 8 days trying to distribute the mileage as equally as possible, utilising the opportunity to tick of some of the longer routes in Zwift and grabbing the badges in the process. I found this worked well, I deliberately didn’t smash the distances out taking 2-3 hours each day depending on the route. I got through quite a few shows on Amazon Prime and Disney+ in the process. In the end I completed 501k at about 10 in the evening on the 31st December. Throughout the event I kept my hr in the 120s other than for sprint segments where I would let it go up to the 140s as I used these as an opportunity to mix things up. On the last day I decided to push a little bit harder as I didn’t need to worry about getting back on the bike the next day but even after that I felt good each day and was enjoying spending longer time on the bike.
As the Rapha 500 came to an end I had expected to start looking at building a proper training plan to start building towards races. That hasn’t quite happened yet as it seems we may be a bit further away from races than I had hoped so I am currently making do with the Tour de Zwift. I am completing most of the stages with the GoodGym group as we normally do a group Zwift ride on a Wednesday.
I am already starting to see the benfits of the increased time I am spending exercise with my fitness and performance starting to return to their previous levels after a significant drop following last years inactiveness.
For the last few years at the end of January I have taken part in an event called the Wattathon. This pits teams of 8 against each other on watt bikes in a showdown to see who can cycle the furthest combined distance in an hour. This year due to the current situation it is being run slightly differently with teams entering as many people as they want and the winning team being the one that covers the most distance. This means that the charities that the event supports are still receive the donations that they need and we still get to ride our bikes. I am planning on using the opportunity to tick off some more route badges on Zwift, tackling the London PRL Full on Saturday and 25 laps of the Volcano on the Sunday. I’ll post more about how this challenge goes once I have recovered!
