Monday 7 July – Sunday 13 July. T-minus 4 weeks to Ride London.
Total Team Sheep Miles: 2323; Total raised for Friendship Works: £523
Big news this week: Audrey took delivery of her new bike on Friday – a Revolution Country Traveller touring bike from the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative. A little lighter than her previous sit-up-and-beg city bike, it also has dropped handle bars which will help with maintaining higher speeds, be better for drafting, and hopefully give a much better position for climbing those hills.
The other big news is that we’ve now both completed over 1000 miles of training! Zoom zoom zoom…
Tuesday: Fast
We followed our usual Tuesday procedure: spinning for Audrey and Richmond Park lapping for Mark (2 laps, first one a new PB of 21m31s, 19.0mph).
Friday: New bike familiarisation & attempted mid-length race pace
The new bike was delivered to Audrey at work; a little light assembly and adjustment and we were on the road shortly after 8pm. Heading to Richmond Park for our race-pace practice, we found both the road and pedestrian gates locked at Roehampton Gate and a number of bewildered-looking people with bikes trapped inside. The pedestrian gate normally stays open late, so we’re not sure why this was, in any case it meant no park riding for us – and an awkward climb out for those stuck inside. We did a loop around Wimbledon Village to get a few more miles in, then headed home – just 17 miles under our belt.
Saturday: 69 miles of hills and lanes
We had another long one pencilled in for this weekend, and Audrey needed a good long ride to get accustomed to the new steed. So we planned a 65-mile route around Surrey taking in some of the area we’d covered last week, some of an excellent Lost Lanes route we’d done last year, and a selection of other bits to join it all up.
For some reason, we really messed up our leaving procedure and headed out at about 13:30 having had only two pieces of toast to eat each. This turned out to be a terrible move – the first 20 miles of the route felt very sluggish, the next 30 just about passable, a climb up Box Hill went quite well but the last 20 miles back from there were awful, and I was particularly struggling.
It had clearly been raining in London while we’d been out, and to finish the ride off perfectly, we decided that following the muddy Wandle Trail rather than the road from Morden back to home was a great idea – thus adding both stinging nettle stings and very muddy bikes to the long list of things to feel miserable about.
The only saving grace, despite lots of stopping and feeling generally awful, the overall pace wasn’t terrible at 11.6mph and we completed 69 miles. We did learn a lot about how important it is to eat properly before heading out on a long ride, though – and it is better to have learnt this now than on race day.
Next Week
After this week’s disruptions, we’ll need to do some extra next week. It’s the peak of our training plan before we start to taper down, and our last chance to really push out the distance.
To that end, Tuesday we’ll both be going to Richmond Park for a fast sprint lap, Wednesday will be hill repeats up & down Wimbledon Hill, Friday will be a 35-40 mile race pace practice, and Sunday will see us doing the longest ride before the day: 80 miles!
The boring stats:
- Weekly distance: 124 miles (Mark), 86 miles + 1hr spinning (Audrey).
- Average moving speed (long ride): 11.7mph
- Moving time (long ride): 5h54m
- Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 2
- Total zero-speed falling-over-due-to-cleat-issues – Mark: 9, Audrey: n/a.
- Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 1278 miles, Audrey: 1045 miles + 6 hours spinning.