Sunday 3 February 2008

EF-Colney Heath-Radlett-Whetstone-EF (54.9km)

After months of hard training with the Finchley group and my fitness peaking very nicely, I finally came down with a pretty bad flu in the 2nd week of January and spent 2 weeks almost completely off the bike. Although I was still able to commute to work, my weekend rides just didn't happen and I definitely felt myself loosing fitness. I was feeling better last weekend, but as fate would have it, the bearings in my bottom bracket ceased last Friday and I couldn't ride that weekend either.

So, after basically 3 weeks without any hard riding I came into this weekend without an excuse not to ride and went out for a solo 55km to see how I was doing. I didn't want to go out with the group because I didn't want to embarrass myself by getting dropped within 15 minutes...

As it turned out I did OK, flying out to Colney Heath with a strong tailwind, averaging 34kph for the first 25km, but paying over the next 30km with fierce head and cross-head winds. The windy conditions made riding very tough, but I managed to keep my HR smooth and paced myself over the nasty little climbs that make up the 2nd half of this route.

With 8km to go I spotted Edgar, the Columbian rider from the Finchley team up ahead and did everything to get on his wheel. Once I'd recovered, we chatted a bit and we shared the work over the last few miles back home. My legs are sore from the hard effort, but it feels good to be out riding again!


View this ride data at Motionbased


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