Long time since my last post. This is due to illness hammering me like a wrecking ball and effectively putting an end to my predicted 2017 mileage of 4500 miles. But it happens and I cannot ignore what an effective year I have had on the bike with 4100 miles logged and with a huge variance in the type of riding. It has been a good year.
The illness started on or around 14th November. Steve and I decided to ride the South Hams, a district of Southern Devon which sits between Newton Abbott and Plymouth with towns such as Totnes and Dartington sandwiched in between. The roads here are incredibly odd. Hard to convey in words, but imagine a bunch of roads like a roller-coaster ride. You go up, you go down, you go up, you go down. To me, roads like this make for tricky riding as you gain speed going down so you hammer the bike into the bike ring and then coast up and then drop it into the small ring to get up the climb. Hard to find tempo or rhythm on the bike like this and certainly tricky when you are ill. But we plod about the ride netting 35 miles with 3,000 feet of climbing breaking down as 1000 feet for every ten or so miles. Lumpy. I just felt odd that day, like I had no power. From then on I have been beset by an absolute stinker of a cold and having a very hard time shaking it off and it has turned into a rotten cough on my chest. I have thrown in two estuary loops which have been tempered by the cold and that is it. In the meantime I have set a bike up on the smart turbo for winter and will use this for various workouts over the coming three months combined with my single speed to commute and build power on. I have just literally done a Wahoo pre-planned mixed interval / pyramid session on the turbo over 40 minutes.
Being honest illness has robbed me of some verve and passion but 2018 looms and the key to remaining committed to your chosen sport is rebooting and going again. I am looking forward to 2018 for sure. Roll on the spring.
