Catch up

Monday was my first long session in a gym, which I spent the majority of time on the bike and next the stepper. The stepper machine was interesting as it had a wattage reading and you could see the effect of increasing and decreasing the difficulty level. Overall I spent around an hour on the machines and did some weights for the legs, although they did not have a specific machine to do leg extensions, rather just the thighs or calfs depending on the setup. 160kg lifts for the thighs and around 120kg for the calfs.

Thursday was a ride in to work and back, which turned out a bit more interesting. Stepped out the door at 5:45am and realised it had just started to spit with rain a little. Given the conditions and what I thought was the forecast I expected it to be brief and stop after 30 minutes or when I got closer to London. Big mistake, about 30 minutes later my shoes were starting to fill with water and I still had an hour to go. Fortunately it eased up and never really rained hard so it was more road splash that soaked the shoes than direct rain. One thing I did realise was my overshoes were not very waterproof at all, rather more like a sponge.

On the way in I did not get any abuse, just a taxi driver trying to get past in a bus lane and on the way home I got a friendly toot from a trucker I waved past on one section of road. All in all one of the better rides in realtion to traffic, oh, appart from the twat who did a U turn in front of me and then breaked like a moron to carry out an emergency left turn. Oh, and the van that cut in front of me in the bus lane to turn left.

The ride home in the end took over 2 hours and felt quite long and I almost was desparate enough for food to ride through the drive in at a MacDonalds. That was before the throught of puking up a greasy burger 5 minutes later up the only long climb back home put me off and I stopped and had a go bar instead.

Today I ended up doing a brief warm up on the rollers and then heading out on the road on the usual 28km route (out and back) with 267m of climbing (50m up one hill at the turning point after a fast desent). Once I started I felt good so decided to even the power out and push it a bit and see what happened. The power figures were good, although I get the feeling I'm riding like a sail into the wind and need to work on position and aerodynamics a lot more. The speed was brought down a bit by the 14 junctions and 1 turn at the bottom of the hill though.

---------Out ----- Return ------ Trip Avg
Watts -- 356/364 - 360/368 ----- 350/363 (average / normalised)
Speed -- 31.6 ---- 36.8 -------- 34.2 (kilometers per hour)
HR avg - 156 ----- 164 --------- 159 (beats per minute)
Distance ----------------------- 25.2km