Our training has now started in earnest. The week just ended was week zero of our twelve week plan, with a target of adding in some mid-week riding and our first formal long ride at the weekend with a target of 40 miles.

Tuesday – 25 miles with five fast

We only managed the one mid-week day of riding this week; a serious lack of sleep and me not being fully back on my game after the half marathon put paid to a second one – just too tired. On Tuesday we did a gentle paced ride to work (9 miles Audrey, 10.5 miles me) then incorporated three reasonably fast continuous laps of Battersea Park into our journey home, getting our heart rates well up and getting used to moving a bit faster on the bikes. The boring stats: 13.0, 14.3, 13.4mph respectively, for a total of 5.1 miles at an average of 13.6mph.

We found a much better route from Battersea Park to the Wandle Trail by following LCN37. It’s mostly quiet back streets and only a touch longer than following CS8 which, along here, is mostly blue patches under a busy lane of cars and buses on Battersea Park Road and York Road.  CS8 is fine at quiet times (read: bank holiday Sundays), but at the time we’re coming home from work it’s a traffic-filled hell, so we’re very happy to have found an alternative. Heavy traffic is the last thing we want after wearing ourselves out in Battersea Park.

The Big Ride

This weekend was the London Cycling Campaign’s Big Ride, a 2.5 mile cycle on closed roads from Park Lane to Embankment via the London landmarks of Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Parliament Square to raise awareness of the Space for Cycling campaign ahead of the London council elections in the coming week. Dangle a few miles of central London closed roads in front of us and we’re like moths to a flame!  So we built that into the day’s route, heading up to the start of the ride via Battersea, Chelsea Bridge and Hyde Park, with a vague plan to head east afterwards along CS3 and see where we ended up.

The Big Ride itself was a wonderful, good-natured ride with people of all ages on bikes of all shapes and sizes.  Pedestrians all along the route were smiling and waving, and the rally at the end had speakers from across the political spectrum all making the right noises, which was highly encouraging.

Our long ride started in earnest after the Big Ride, eventually finding the start of CS3 after bumbling around Tower Hill. This is one of the better superhighways, largely having its own dedicated space along a fairly quiet corridor. We followed it to Limehouse Basin (where the Regent’s Canal meets the Thames), then went along the Limehouse Cut towpath to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Once there, we had a good explore; the wide paths about the park are all cycleable but the on-road provision is utterly woeful. It’s very depressing that such poor cycling facilities have been built on an essentially blank canvas. The most tragic-hilarious of all is the bridge to the Lee Valley VeloPark, which has very narrow advisory on-carriageway cycle lanes.  It’s not like anyone might cycle to a velodrome, mountain bike course, BMX track or road cycling circuit, eh? It would have been better if they’d not bothered putting anything.

While pootling around, I managed to cycle into an utterly pointless bollard which had been inexplicably placed in the middle of a cycle track, luckily with no harm done other than to my pride. On reaching the VeloPark, we cycled about having a look at things then went on to the beautiful road cycling circuit, a billiard-table-smooth one mile long, six metre wide track with a great selection of elevation changes, banked corners and lovely long straights. Three speedy fun laps of that (14.4, 16.6 and 14.6mph respectively) and we decided we’d best start working our way home, before we overshot our target distance by a huge margin. After we left, we worked out that apparently you’re supposed to pay to use the road track, though honestly we have no idea how, we just followed a big sign that said road track this way and then we were out on it. Still, at £6 for an hour it’s not crazily expensive for a mile-long track for doing speed work, so we may well make our way back here in the coming weeks, and if we do we’ll put some effort into working out just how you’re supposed to pay.

We headed home via the Greenway, Victoria Park, the Regent’s Canal, then a selection of LCN routes across London ending up back on LCN37 and the Wandle Trail, for a total day’s distance of around 46.7 miles (including the 3.6 of the Big Ride which were, to be honest, as much walking on a bike as riding, and two miles back from the post-ride pub visit, so we’ll not include those in the total).

We were tired, but not destroyed, and both felt like we could have done more – which is good because next week we’ll be doing 50 miles, and at a more consistent pace too.

The boring stats

• Weekly distance: 69.1 miles (Mark), 65.5 miles (Audrey), of which 41 miles was our long weekend ride, 5.1 miles paced lapping Battersea Park.
• Average moving speed (Battersea Park laps): 13.6mph
• Moving time (Battersea Park laps): 34m42s.
• Average moving speed (long weekend ride): 10.6mph
• Moving time (long weekend ride): 3h52m
• Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
• Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 462 miles, Audrey: 421 miles.