Getting things sorted

Today was a really productive day; not in absolute training terms but certainly looking to the longer term.

After a walk along the seafront with Bandit, we had a quick breakfast and then headed over to Portsmouth. For those that don't know the area, this requires a short ferry journey or a lengthy car ride; we opted for the ferry. Once on the other side, we headed around the corner to the Gunwharf Quays shopping area, and quite impressed the family were too. Lots of outlet shops selling stuff at way below MRP, and loads of restaurants, cafes etc. There was a Cadbury's shop, so we are sat here this evening munching through a large bag of misshapes! And we found a chinese restaurant doing an all you can eat buffet lunch. The food was really excellent and I have to confess that I have over indulged (yes, again!). My scales have mysteriously disappeared this week too!

When I got home I got stuck in to sorting out the garage. I had taken two car loads to the recycling centre yesterday so it was time to get the power tools out and start putting things into place. The Dolan and the Litespeed are now securely hanging on the garage wall, extra lights are up to supplement the weedy garage light to allow maintenance tasks to take place after dark and, most important of all, the turbo trainer is now up and running. This of course means that serious training can start again - Yippee! I have 24 weeks to lose 10lbs or so and get myself into shape to ride at 36kmh for 5 hours and I am really looking forward to the challenge of both training and racing. I suspect that I will be in no good shape for the Brize sprint next month but I'm going to use that as my first target to at least be close to my racing weight, and if I can beat my bike split from last year I would leave Brize a very happy person.

The first training target is to complete 420km of cycling next week, to be done as 60km a day every day. This will be done at relatively low intensity (ie fat burning zone) although as I don't believe in the "lots of base miles" training philosophy (I simply don't do enough training hours to justify this) I will be doing one interval based turbo session during the week. This is likely to be the 6 x 6 minute session, supposedly done at 105% of FTP although to be honest I am not sure what my FTP is at the moment so I will just make an educated guess and see what the HRM is telling me. I will certainly know if it's too hard! I plan to keep the base miles phase going until the end of June, although there are a couple of sprint tris and the Inter Services Sportive in this period to keep things interesting. Hopefully by the end of June my endurance will have returned and I can start adding in some speed work. This will go through to the Inter Services TT Champs in August where I hope to do both the 10 and 25 mile events and hopefully record some new PBs; it would be brilliant to go sub hour for the 25. After that I'm not too sure what the programme will be, so am seeking the advice of others. If I have a solid enough base then I suspect that hard 50 mile efforts are what would be required to increase my speed for the 112 miles at Barcelona (if they're good enough for Hywel Davies ...); the good thing is that I can do these on the turbo.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from me, train smart folks.