Right, one final assault!

  Just two, possibly three chances…

  ....to get under 21 minutes this season.  As ever, it’s in the lap of the Gods really and depends on getting decent weather but I’m giving myself every fighting chance.

  I’ve had a fairly easy season really – started pretty late, haven’t raced a lot and haven’t really trained an awful lot so I haven’t had that burned out feeling you get sometimes this time of year.

  So, with nothing really to lose, I embarked on a ‘training camp’ which started pretty much during the last open on the E2 a couple of weekends ago.

 Lots and lots of full-on turbo work and the odd gentle spin out on the MTB to try and keep a little sanity and to stay limbered up.

  The aim is to try and induce one of my ’Day 10 Peaks’  - a mysterious surge in form I get halfway through the second easy week after a big smash of training.  Had the last of my big efforts last night in a TT so now, thank God, I can rest up a bit. Absolutely knackered.

  So, in 10 day’s time, I have another date with destiny with the V718. It's a humungous field - over 300 riders.  I'm second to last off at 15:59. Some bloke called Michael Hutchinson is away a minute behind me.  I've heard he's quite good...

  As a back-up, I’m also riding the almost-as-quick F11/10 in Herts the next day. Fingers crossed.

  I’m down to ride the fairly rapid local B10/35 course on the Saturday but I’ve got a horrible feeling I’m going to be stuck at work in Norwich until gone 14:00 so it’s looking dodgy. I rode the B10/35 a few times in the mid 90’s and always loved the helter-skelter type starting run down the sliproad from the overhead bridge. Be gutted to miss it.

  As for the training, I’ve been riding blocks of 20 min threshold sessions on the turbo mainly, usually managing 3 or 4 blocks before the drop in quality made me stop.

  Rode my local club 10 on the Thursday feeling absolutely stuffed after a big turbo session the previous day and was amazed to break my course PB by a few seconds on a very windy night.

22:49. Get in!!

 On Sunday I only managed 2 x 20 min blocks and was aware I was ridiculously choppy and uncoordinated because I was so tired so just stopped before I injured something.

  Forced myself out on the MTB for a couple of hours on Monday and Tuesday going really steady and started to feel much better.

 

33 miles at 14 mph. Oh dear....

 Another steady ride yesterday was punctuated with a few miles off road around Fritton Woods and up Sandy Lane to try and remind me that cycling was actually fun.  Hmmm, it can be, sort of...

 Then home, chuck the TT bike in the back of the car and off to Scoulton for the club 10.

  I very nearly missed my ride as I arrived at the ‘old’ start of the course to find it deserted… then remembered the new version of the course that I rode a couple of years ago.  A slightly panicky blast back to Hingham found me at the start of the right course with a couple of minutes to spare. Doh!!

3 – 2 – 1 – Go!

  Very tired – max HR was 158 compared with a normal ‘10’ average of 172. Felt very dieselly though – my body decided it preferred pushing big gears for a change but I was going alright. Another one of those knackered rides where pacing is a doddle – it’s physically impossible to blow up!

  22:09 which I’m sure is a course PB (although I think I’ve only ridden this course once before so that's cheating a bit) so got to be happy with that.  It’s made me again consider my ratio of training to resting and it’s convinced me even more that I’ve been slightly ‘over-rested’ for large parts of this season. But, and I’ll say it again, I’d sooner be too fresh than chronically over-trained. That’s just a horrible place to be...

  My aim was to ride the Somerleyton club 10 again tonight but I’m just too knackered. To be honest, that low max HR last night has made me appreciate just how wrecked I’ve made myself. Time to stop now.

  STOP.

 Just Stop Andy!

  I’ll stay off the bike until Sunday then see how I feel before I decide what to do next.

  Apart from all the hard work, I’ve also been doing some fun stuff. I was donated a Blackberry by my daughter when she got her iPhone a few months ago and, being an old fart, never really used it for anything other than phone calls and texts.  I’ve been mucking about with it more and more - hence the GPS cycle mapping thingy above. It’s also now made me realize why she got rid of it! I want an iPhone!!

  Been doing some aero tweaks too…

  Since I’ve been going slightly faster, I’ve been a bit more aware of the air rushing around me.  Aerodynamics is often a very counter-intuitive science and you dabble at your peril but an amazing opportunity presented itself the other day and I just had to use it…

  I remember camping years ago and lighting one of those mosquito repellent smokey things. In the light evening breeze, I enjoyed watching the smoke stream over my hand wind tunnel style, seeing how it followed the curves of my fingers & changing the angle of attack until my hand ‘stalled’ etc.

  Anyway, on a windy day last week I’d got all the doors and windows in the house open to try and get rid of the smell of two wet dogs (swimming in the muddy Waveney – never a good idea.)  Couple of incense sticks lit and… oh, that’s interesting – a perfect sideways stream of smooth smoke moving through the kitchen. (You can already see where this is going, can’t you?!)

  Yep, you guessed it – bike and rider set up in the airflow with 'smoke source' on the end of a garden cane and a video camera. DIY wind tunnel – Tada!

  Thing is, you can laugh but it was very enlightening…

  Incense sticks soon proved to be too feeble a source of smoke so I used one of Sue’s smudge sticks which pretty much smoked the house out but worked a treat.  Here’s an early experiment with my pointy aero hat….

  Good innit!  Pretty smooth flow with the odd gust spoiling it but I suppose wind tunnel type smooth airflows don't exist on dual carriageways either!
 Amazing the useful knowledge you pick up through life. When I was managing a huge factory years ago, a major bugbear was staff smoking in the toilets so I had the walls painted black so that I'd be able to spot which cubicle the smoke was emanating from. Hence the black blanket here - same principle!

  Impossible on this primitive MK1 setup to measure drag and the air is only moving at 5-10 knots but it’s a useful tool for seeing where the turbulence is and seeing the route the that the air takes.  What I found was:

•   The previously open tail of my pointy hat generates a lot of turbulence. Filling it in smooths the flow over my back a lot (although my head gets roastingly hot now!). I had read this somewhere and had intended to fill the gap in earlier in the season but never got around to it. Filled in now though!

•   Pulling my elbows and shoulders in has two effects:

1.   The air splits further ahead and seems to stagnate & burble far less in the area between your elbows and face when the aerobars are as close together as possible.
2.   With the bars set narrow, there is far less burble of the air by my hip bones and it reattaches much sooner. I can actually feel this while riding now – the previous ‘tickle’ at the sides of my bum has gone.

  I’m no expert but I imagine this has something to do with the air damming up and decelerating under your chest and belly then spilling out and mixing with the faster moving air each side of you.

  Very interesting.

  Having the bars set so narrow has made the bike trickier to ride but along with the slight drop in saddle height I did a few weeks ago which allows me to stretch out on the bars and straighten my back more, I’m convinced it has made me a bit more slippery. I do fidget a lot on the bike but I’ve been trying my hardest to stay in a nice tuck during races recently.

  I reset my bars and filled my hat in two rides ago and have set two course PB’s since despite being knackered. Yeah, I know, I know, we’re probably looking at a marginal gain of a second or two but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? As with most things though, just thinking you’re faster often makes you go faster!