Archive for the ‘Training’ tag
Atlas Mountains Trip – training progress
The following table shows details of my training throughout September 2010 for my Atlas Mountains trip, both planned and actual. On the whole I did well – normally doing more each session than I’d set in my (fairly conservative) plan, only tailing off in the last week when the weather was bad and I was concentrating on final preparations. I found that actually writing down a schedule did work well – as it gave me a nice target to try and beat.
| Date | Planned | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Sat 4 Sep | 20+ miles on road bike. | 42 miles Hayling to Petersfield |
| Sun 5 Sep | Light/family ride | 23 miles Hayling, Portsmouth and Portsdown hill |
| Wed 8 Sep | 10+ miles on mountain bike | 11.5 miles (Tue 7th) Egham/Windsor Great park. |
| Sat 11 Sep | Light/family ride | 11 miles around Hayling |
| Sun 12 Sep | 20+ miles on road bike | 49 miles Egham to Henley EveryTrail route |
| Mon 13 Sep | - | 40 miles commuting. EveryTrail route |
| Tue 14 Sep | Commute to work (19 miles x2) | 13 miles. Windsor Great Park again. EveryTrail route |
| Wed 15 Sep | - | 40 miles commuting. EveryTrail route |
| Sun 19 Sep | Light/family ride | A few miles along Hayling beach |
| Tue 21 Sep | Commute to work (19 miles x2) | 40 miles commuting. EveryTrail route |
| Sat 25 Sep | Queen Elizabeth country park | 5 miles (Fri 24th) - morning school run with Trailer Bike |
| Sun 26 Sep | Light/family ride | 39 miles. QE Park, Southdowns Way and Hayling Billy Trail |
| Tue 28 Sep | Commute to work (19 miles x2) | - |
| Sat 2 Oct | Light/family ride | - (ah well it's the last week anyway!) |
| Sun 3 Oct | Leave for Morocco! | Total (in September): 316 miles |
Bike Training in Queen Elizabeth Country Park
Rob and I set out for a bit of early year training on my favourite training ride in Queen Elizabeth Country Park, near Petersfield. The park itself has 2 waymarked mountain biking routes, novice and advanced. It is also right on the South Downs Way so I find an excellent 2 hour training route can be made out of riding out and back along the Way for an hour and finishing up with riding the advanced course in the park.
The novice course begins with a gravel track quickly followed by all the climbing for the route in one go. The descent is then on wide tracks with some brief spots of singletrack. The advanced course however has much more variety with climbing sections, singletrack sections and a technical downhill switchback section. My favourite part of it though is the last section which is of the flowing downhill singletrack variety.
In terms of effort I find the novice course almost as tough as the advanced one with the advanced one being a lot more fun so I invariably plump for advanced. Anyway, despite it being only a few degrees above 0, it was a beautiful day and got me inspired to get out there more often in the coming months.
