A busy day, lots of miles in the car, and then a fair few kilometres on the bike. It’s Thursday, I have one week day left off work, and by the looks of it (or according to the weather forecast) it’s rain tomorrow. So, armed with that knowledge, and with fairly tired legs, I plotted a fairly flat route, got into my winter kit (including new long sleeve base layer) and got pedalling.
One thing I think that the Garmin route planner could do better, aside from allowing you to choose a default starting location, is to show a list of climbs that are in your plotted route. Only when I got outdoors did I find that I had a climb in my route. No big deal, and actually I quite enjoyed climbing out of Ribchester as I’ve never done that route before. Have to say though, doing a traffic lights hill start on clip in pedals? Yeah, that’s no fun.
As I’d already surpassed my weekly 100km riding goal prior to setting off today, I didn’t have any specific targets or similar for this ride. Just get outdoors, enjoy the ride as best I could, and try to not return to the urban areas until after 4pm, which should be perfectly timed between the end of the school traffic and the start of the worst parts of rush hour.
For a week day, I think I got the timing of this one wrong. I should have done the car miles later and the bike ride earlier. It was quite a “main road” heavy ride this one, and the fast passing traffic and horrible car fumes were unwelcome. Nothing like my usual Sunday mornings.
I’d have liked to have got the ride in that I wanted. I had planned on doing a 70km ride out to Lancaster and back again. That got put on the back burner as when I woke up, the roads were soaked from rain during the night. That’s why I left this one later today. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I guess a 40km outdoor ride is better than my usual Thursday, anyway.
I have some Zwifting still to do this week. There’s the Zwift Academy 2020 group ride to get in before the week is out, and maybe another ride if the weather takes the downturn that the forecast predicts. Sunday may be my next outdoor ride. And then it’s off to the new job on Monday.
