Irontwit

Looking back through my training diaries I can see that for the last few winters at least I’ve been out running and riding on the roads throughout. A succession of mild winters has meant that I haven’t bothered at all with indoor training. This winter, of course, has been completely different. It started off with a nasty chest infection in the run up to Christmas which meant no training at all. Then, as I started to recover from that I pulled a calf muscle badly, after a further week’s recovery the calf went again (in a different place). Along came the Big Freeze and that ruled out riding, too (not having an mtb to head out into the white stuff). As a result, I’ve had 6 whole weeks off the bike and it’s only through the last week gone that I’ve managed to do anything like a proper week’s training since Christmas

Amazingly, I’m running really well. The calf has benefited from the rest, as well as all the extra yoga and core strength that I’ve been doing. I’ve been making sure that all my runs have a high cadence element to them at some point, and I’m keeping the intensity much higher than I normally would at this time of year. Hopefully, this will mean that the fitness will come back relatively quickly.

The cycling, on the other hand, has been little short of a disaster. I managed to commute to and from work once last week, and my legs were shocked. It didn’t help that I’d switched from a compact crankset to a 52/39 as I want to train much more specifically for time trialling this year. At some point I’m going to have to switch back to a compact, as I haven’t got a hope in hell of getting round the Fred Whitton on a standard crankset. In the meantime, my legs are just going to have to take the burn as I try and build the strength to turn over bigger gears on the flat.

I'm in the Fred Whitton for 2010 again