March 08

March has turned out to be a bit of an up and down month to be honest. It started well with some really long rides, the longest of which was 6 hours! This saw me cycling from Stalbridge to Crewkerne and then turning south and heading for Lyme Regis. Once I reached Lyme, I followed the coastal road east to West Bay and then finally onto Weymouth.

Things went rapidly downhill after this initial good start though, as during the first couple of weeks of the month, and no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t seem to be able to make any real progression in my training. This all culminated in a disastrous turbo trainer session one Sunday where I got off the bike after only 30 minutes (partly due to the turbo trainer breaking!) feeling terrible. I was shivering and shaking, and after showering, I went straight to bed.

Now whilst I’m probably the least likely person in the world to suffer from ‘overtraining’, I do think that my frustration in my apparent lack of progression had led me to push harder in training, and I also wasn’t allowing sufficient recovery time in between sessions. Couple these factors with the news that there were already several colds floating around work and I can now see I was building myself up for a fall!

Needless to say, I spent most of the following week in bed with a stinking cold. In total I was off the bike for over a week and a half, and despite being worried I’d have forgotten how to ride a bike in that time, I actually returned to training in a far stronger position than I expected. Clearly the rest had done me some good and had allowed my body the time to catch up with all these new demands I was making of it.

Amy was required to spend another week in the U.S. with her work during March and this really brought home to me how dependent I am on everybody else around me during the preparations for this trip. Whilst she was away I was finding it very difficult to squeeze everything I needed to do into the few hours in between getting home from work and going to bed. I guess it takes times like these to really appreciate how much everybody else is helping me with this challenge.

We’ve also continued with the preparations for the next fundraising party on the 12^th of April. We’ve decided not to have a theme, but there’ll still be plenty of activities to keep everybody occupied on the night – I’m thinking of taking my turbo trainer and mountain bike (I’m not letting anybody else ride my road bike!!) and having some sort of distance/speed challenge. We’ve still got a few weeks left for planning so I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

I hope next months diary entry doesn’t contain anymore tales of colds as I really need to start putting in some serious training…………