Back on the trails…

Right then, I admit it, I’m writing this post in January 2015 after falling off the blogging wagon in September. So why am I writing it now? Well, I started writing a blog to help myself remember and learn from my racing and training and only secondarily to share the experience. I suspect I can count my entire, occasional, audience on the fingers of one hand (hi, family!) so it remains primarily a diary to supplement the cryptic sentence or two I write for each workout and race in my private trainingpeaks.com log. So, while I can still just about recall the last three months of 2014, I figure it’s worth jotting down a diary entry for each month!

So, October… No races – something of a relief! What training? Running roads and fields, often with Emsworth-Basingstoke team mates. And the mountain bikes came out of the garage regularly for the first time. Bikes plural, because two days a week, I’ve been mtb-commuting to work on Em’s bike so she can bike home those days. Sometimes I made the journey longer by heading off in the wrong direction and exploring some local trails, other days I just did intervals on the shortest available route by attacking the Strava segments, hopeless on knobbly tyres, but fun! I don’t enjoy the commute on my road bike, but the available routes are a good mix of sub-urban mtb terrain and I’ll try to keep this up right through the winter. In fact, the road bike only got one outing all month, and I got a puncture, so it’s sulking indoors now. I mixed things up with some night rides too – nothing technical, I have no mtb skills – and my only wipe-out came when my headlight battery pack failed on a moonless evening commute home!

Next month, I hope to get a weekly lunchtime mtb ride with some colleagues, organised by Will Murphy, our current gym manager. I should probably put the road bike on the turbo, but while there’s base training to be had outside, I’m going to shun the garage!

Finally, here’s the comparison between this month’s training, last month, and this month last year.