Festive exploits

The post Christmas period of sales and throwing away out-of-date food and wishing you hadn't eaten so much is upon us. From a training perspective it has been a good period, the weekend of the 13th / 14th December 79 miles and the weekend prior to Christmas started a cumulative ride distance of 191 miles in 1 week with various other training sessions like my first post-op run of 8 miles on the fells on Christmas Eve, running in a 1.2m deep swimming pool - 1 mile sessions at about 32 minutes.

The Christmas Eve run was followed by coffee, brandy, whiskey and mince pies back at the cars, well worthwhile and fantastic weather, the views from the top of Great Hill were getting up towards 40 miles. I blame Thomo for this festive excess, it was all his idea. See pic, top right at recent Leverhulme Park XC in November 08.

The 2 long rides of note in this period were 53m on 23rd Dec: Chorley - Darwen - Horden Rake - Lower Darwen - Shadsworth - Grane Road - Haslingden - Belmont - Rivington (Cafe !) - Coppul - Eccleston - Leyland, very hilly, estimate around 1200m in the 53m. Then 59m on the 27th Dec: Chorley - Preston - Grimsargh - Longridge - Chipping (Cafe - to thaw out my 15 year old son who was in the early stages of hypothermia !) - Great Mitton - Whalley - York - Blackburn - Pleasington - Wheelton - Chorley. Cliff (Brown - trains with us but not doing the Etape) came off on a patch of diesel on a roundabout, no real damage done apart from pride and a new pair of long cycling pants. Thomo has just had his chainset changed to a 50/34 compact, which is excactly what I'm using, or will be when I sort the new bike in the new year. Regarding my son, Ciaran (15), he does quite well all things considered, staying with us for nearly 60 miles at an average speed of over 15 mph.

The good news from the Etape party is that Yvonne is joining us for the event, assuming we can add her to the party. Yvonne Russell (36) experienced Ironman Triathlete, is warmly welcomed to our small group and will in all seriousness probably show us testosterone junkies how it should be done.

All in all, the post operation recovery has been fantastic so far, just hope I can carry on, sustain this training effort till March then pick it up.

Christmas brought me various cycling related bits like Assos clothing, so nicely presented I don't want to take them out of their boxes ! oh, and a lightweight folding aluminium work stand.

The cyclefilm.com Etape recon DVD arrived just before Christmas so we had a Ventoux evening on the 27th to terrify ourselves as to the enormity of our undertaking. There were some worried faces, particularly on the Ventoux ascent. It'll be tough but for me at least this will be my third Etape and I have never trained through the winter before so I hope this will have a massive payback come the big day. On a lighter note, the Cotes des Ventoux red wine is excellent and the Cyclefilms DVD is really well done, they get better each year, well worth the money.