Portugal and Training by Numbers

First things first, most of the injuries are well on the way to being totally mended now. I have some very strange areas on my body now though where it looks like I have some strange disease where the pigment has gone from my skin...my arm looks pretty bad. As for the training, I am back doing most things now, have been riding already and have recently made it back into the pool as well. Running on the other hand is not so good, I hurt my chest in the fall and it is still hurting a bit when I run, albeit, it is on the mend.

I flew out to Portugal last Thursday in what can only be described as a pretty bad mood. I just didn't know how much training I was going to be able to do, I had not ridden my bike for 4 days and the wounds were still looking a little raw really. I had decided that I would go out for a ride though as soon as we got back to the flat to see how things felt. In the end, it all felt okay and I suddenly realised that all was not lost, I was at least going to be able to ride for the week, not that riding was what I really needed to do though. I was under strict instruction from my coach to take it easy for a while though and just allow the injuries time to heal. I did try, but 20km's into the first ride, I couldn't resist and started to pedal a bit harder, and then a bit harder and before I knew it, I had knocked out 40km at pretty much race pace and had just done my longest ride in ages (60km).

Once I realised that the riding was not really causing me any problems, I quickly slumped into the pro cyclist lifestyle..the routine for the next 6 was therefore waking up early to have a nice breakfast and then going on the bike for 3 to 4 hours. Riding over there in the sun and with the occasional sight of the sea definitely makes riding that bit easier compared to the rain and traffic lights of here.

Anyway, I did all my riding out in Portugal on my Dad's steed, a nice little carbon fibre number that rides pretty well actually. My dad is one for his gadgets though and on my first ride he loaded up the handlebars with enough computing power to send a man to the moon. At any one time I could look down and by the time I had taken in all of the information, I was finding that I was about 200m further down the road....a death trap for sure. In the end I removed the heart rate monitor and settled for the Garmin GPS and the normal bike computer, that way I could get pretty much all that I needed.

The Garmin would supply with info like direction, elevation, speed, calories (wrong), time, time of day etc etc.


It is all strangely addictive though, but the best bit is when you get home and you plug the device into the PC.....all of a sudden you can see exactly what happened all the way through the ride (annoyingly, it can also highlight areas where you have made stupid mistakes or gone the wrong way)

You end up with a nice map though which is linked to Google. This one below was probably one of my hardest rides of the week, riding out to one of the bigger hills in the area and going up it three times, trying to beat the last time on each ascent...which I did :-)

The graph at the bottom can also be expanded to show you your speed over the terrain and I am pretty pleased with this one actually, not because I was able to average about 28kph up the 4k climb, but that after 75k's of riding, including the 12k of climbing, I was then able to do 20km averaging about 40kph on the final stretch coming back to the apartment.

Well, at the end of the week, I realised that I had managed to knock up just shy of 600km which has to be a record for me I think. My legs are feeling a bit tired at the moment, so I am having a few days off the bike, I think that I deserve a bit of a break.

Just need to get back out running now though...