January Goal Achieved...

My Day:
Today’s plan - Train, Lunch, Train, Rest, Coaching, Dinner, Sleep.
 
The Bike:
2 x Turbo sessions…
 
The Photo:
Little and Often…

In December 2019 with the new decade looming I decided to ride my bike more in the 20’s… So where to start I thought as I’ve not ridden much in the last decade and to be truthful the number of decades I have left to ride have sadly disappeared.

So, my masterplan was to try and ride my bike 31 or more times in January, the rules were that each ride must be 30 minutes or longer and could be on or off road or on the turbos (static bike indoors). I did not care what speed I did as long as I did something (Who am I kidding, being so slow drove me crazy).

So, the 1st January arrived, and I jumped on the turbos… and plugged away for 30 minutes and thought there is the first tick in the box. I did not crack until the 7th Jan when I took a day off from the dreaded turbos. I then managed 12 rides over 10 days on turbos and mountain bike before three days off. Then only a couple of days on the turbos in that week.

Well the last week of January arrived and I was behind schedule and after going to watch some racing at the National Track Championships I was fired up to reach my goal but had sadly drifted quite a bit behind. I had 5 days left and 11 rides to do, and we were definitely in the quantity verse quality arena now. Clearly the turbos offered the most chance of achieving the goal with a ride in the morning and another in the afternoon. Well I managed to get the 11 rides done in the last week so hit the goal of 31 rides in January.

So, did little and often work?

The pros:
·         30 minutes rides did give my undercarriage a chance to harden up.
·         30 minutes is achievable at most levels of fitness and allows you to ride the following day.
·         Mentally it was good to achieve a goal.
·         I now am in a better position to ride on the road a little easier.
·         Turbos removed the embarrassment of being overtaken by almost everyone.

The cons:
·         No real structure to training to allow improvement.
·         So much turbo work was quite boring.
 
Well it’s February tomorrow and I suppose I will have to ride my bike 29 times or more… I will let you know how things went on the 1st March.
 
More tomorrow.

POG,,