MONDAY2nd June - 5 weeks to go

Miles last week 173 (158 road, 15 indoors)
Climbing 10,100ft (3,000m)!
Weight : 14st 5.0lbs (-0.0 lbs)
Body fat : 25.5% (+2%)!
Tantia body type 2 (obese)


A half term week in London while Ros is in India visiting Sarah. With a bit of lucky coincidence, Paul, has just resigned giving himself 3 months gardening leave... so, we headed down to Richmond Park to do the three lap challenge - good first lap at 20:20, but then a mechanical (gears on my new bike sounded like a bag of bolts in a washing machine) and a lot of traffic slowed us down, so just under 1hr 5mins. The next day decided to try and find some hills in London so headed north.. came across West Hill in Hampstead. Fairly quite, half a mile long and 7% average with 10% at the top. Did that a couple of times and came home.

Then at the weekend, the Chiltern 100. A race of two halves - first 50 miles fairly flat with some rolling hills, we were lulled into a false sense of security and were feeling pretty upbeat at the half way mark. Second half, however, was a series of very long and steep hills... good news is that I got up them all without getting off (albeit very slowely) bad news is felt fairly knackered at the end.

Simon, from Etape Virgins, points out that Garmin height measurement is a bit variable and the real climbing on the Chiltern run was 2620m while Etape will be 'only' 760m more than that or two thirds of the final climb up the Hautaucam. Definitely could not face that at the end of the ride yesterday, however, five weeks to go could loose up to half a stone in weight and get a lot more hill practice in... so you never know...

Back to the bag of bolts... bike was just about unrideable in most of the gears so was looking bad for the Chiltern run. However, rang Condor on Thursday and they said they would look at it first thing Friday morning. Turning up in Greys Inn Road at 8.55 found a little queue of cyclists waiting for the shop to open... true to their word, they grabbed the bike and 15 mins later all done. Gears feel great now, must have been a bit of cable stretching on a new bike. Really do need to figure out some rudimentary bike maintenance...