Training Rides

Week 4: Concentrated Cycling

Monday 9 June – Sunday 15 June. T-minus 8 weeks to Ride London.

Apologies for the late post for Week 4, we’ve been away so haven’t had chance to write it until now.

We’re building back up the distances and intensities after our recovery week, so back to our usual pattern of a short fast ride, rollers, or spinning early in the week, a medium length, medium paced ride mid-week, and a substantial long ride towards the end of the week – 50 miles this time. However, a trip away meant a compressed cycling schedule, needing to get the full week’s worth done by Friday lunchtime.

Team Sheep Just Giving

Tuesday – Fast

Audrey went for the high-intensity spin class option for her fast-paced training this week. I, meanwhile, went a little over the top – a fast commute was going to be all, but then this twitter conversation occurred while I was sat writing last week’s post :

Thanks for the prompt “Super Cycling Man”, it was indeed a beautiful evening and I’m glad I went. However, the “quick” extra ride was 20 miles… and our next ride was due Wednesday. Eeeek! Overall for the day – 39 miles at an average 15.2mph.

Wednesday – Medium pace, medium distance

As you’ve no doubt noticed, we’ve used Richmond Park for an awful lot of our training and would be doing so again on Friday, so Audrey quite sensibly suggested we do something different on Wednesday. There’s not many options for doing a decent paced ride without lots of interruptions in London, so we went for Battersea Park – another stalwart of our training – planning three laps in each direction at a decent pace (~12 miles, plus ~6.5 miles each way there and back, giving us 25 miles).

Our plan was thwarted upon reaching the park as a Cancer Research Race for Life run was taking place. It was winding down as we arrived but there were road closures still in place and many hundreds of pedestrians strolling along having finished their run. This was not conducive to the decent-paced cycling we needed, and in any case we have no desire to be those annoying people zooming on bikes through crowds, scaring everyone. We had a chat with a friendly police officer who said the roads would be reopening in about half an hour. So we did a few miles of road cycling before returning for some back and forth in the now-quieter Battersea Park to finish up. Overall we did 21 miles, with a slower than intended pace of 12mph due to all the disruptions.

Friday – a brief 50-miler before lunchtime!

And so on to the challenging one. We still needed to get our 50-mile cycle in for the week, but also needed to be back home by midday to shower, finish packing and leave for our trip at 1pm. The plan: a very simple ride to Richmond Park where we would do laps of different sections until we reached the required distance.

So, up at the crack of dawn (by our standards) and on the road at 8am, giving us four hours to complete the distance. The simple route was intended to have two benefits: no time wasted wayfinding, and no time wasted at traffic lights, junctions, and so forth – both of which were very important with such a tight time window!

We started with two full 6.7mi laps of the park – Audrey’s first in our Ride London training as until now we’ve skipped the very hilly section from Ham Cross to Robin Hood Gate when riding together. It was good to get these hills in, but probably not the wisest choice after only four hours sleep. The first lap went okay but after that we got increasingly sluggish – the lack of sleep combined with low energy and caffeine levels had us fading fast.

We struggled through to 24 miles and had a quick cake & coffee break, then after another shorter lap with fewer hills (and still feeling sluggish), we had our first experiment with energy gels (horrible things but they did seem to work wonders for us this time). As we were running out of time, we also decided to use a relatively flat section of the park and repeatedly loop back and forth along it. This may have been boring, but as the energy gel kicked in we finally lost the sluggishness and lifted the pace substantially.

We were running critically short on time by the end, but finished in the park and rode the final six miles home to complete 50.9 miles in 4h20m – a substantial improvement on any previous long ride in terms of total overall time, but leaving us very little time to shower and pack before heading on our trip!

Our route, click for full details

Overall, a bit of a mixed ride. The first half was pretty darned awful – sluggish feeling and slow pace. The overall time of the ride, at 4h20m, would also be too slow if we simply double it to give a vague projection for the full 100 miles. However, the last 20 miles we did at a much higher pace, showing that we can recover from a sluggish start and, if we extrapolate out from the pace of that section for another 50 miles we get a much happier 7h50m projection for the 100 miles. We need to do many more of these morning rides to work out how to lift that sluggishness sooner – maybe starting with an energy gel with caffeine, maybe having more sleep for the several nights before…

Next Week

We will be away from home for much of next week, so it should be an interesting few rides in new places! What that will mean for our pace and plan remains to be seen…

The boring stats:

  • Weekly distance: 111.5 miles (Mark), 72.1 miles (Audrey).
  • Average moving speed (long ride): 13.1mph
  • Moving time (long ride): 3h52m
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 2
  • Total zero-speed falling-over-due-to-cleat-issues – Mark: 9, Audrey: n/a (still clever enough not to get involved in such stupid devices).
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work, not including spinning or rollers) – Mark: 847 miles, Audrey: 678 miles.