Weekly Review April 17th – 23rd 2023

Each week I try to review and reflect on my previous week on the bike. This allows me to see how my fitness and ability is progressing on a wider timescale than day to day. For previous weekly reviews please click here

Not the best week overall.

Five riding days, but nothing great out of all of them.

And one was a howler.

Here are this week’s rides:

I gotta be honest, I’m looking for the positives from this week, and I’m not finding too many.

Overall the race on Tuesday was a solid workout.

Beyond that… this one was a bit of a bust.

At just 3.5 hours total riding time, I’m way down on where I was just a few weeks ago. Had I not thrown in a short, but overly intensive ride on Friday evening the numbers would be even lower than they already are.

And that wasn’t a great use of the time. I went too fast, too quickly, and I’m convinced that session did more harm than help. Silly me.

I think what’s most frustrating me, really, this week is Sunday. I was at a wedding on Saturday night and got as drunk as you might expect. For someone who gets a bad hangover from drinking two cans of beer in an evening, you can probably imagine the state of me after (as best I remember) 1.5 bottles of white wine. I had the common sense (erm, my wife made me) not to mix booze, but still, Sunday was an absolute write off.

The other thing that went wrong this week was Saturday’s ride.

It never feels good to fail / DNF a workout. And whilst I did finish the SST session, I had to dramatically reduce the intensity of the second half.

As I say, yesterday (Sunday) was a write off, and today is a rest day.

Will that be sufficient to have recovered for tomorrow’s Tuesday race day? We shall see, I suppose. Right now though, my thighs feel weak. That’s not a good omen.

All in then, probably one to put in the rear view mirror, and move swiftly on.

I’ve unintentionally been a bit slack tracking my weight it seems.

Going to be a fun check in tonight, all that booze taken into account. Oh, and cake. I do remember indulging in cake. And pizza. And chips.

Whoops.

Still, you have to live.

Saying that though, I then barely ate on Sunday. I took one bite of toast at breakfast, nearly puked and had to rapidly leave. Sad times. So potentially my weight will be down 🙂 ha.

Ridiculous.

Nothing major to worry about here, either way.

Week Ahead

For the week ahead then, it’s a standard week.

We have the race tomorrow – Stage 4 of the Cobble Crushers series. This might be the last stage for the month, which may mean a dual event. I haven’t checked that yet.

Then on Wednesday I’ll look to do the second of the Zwift Spring Training series, and see how I get on with that. I think this ones FTP related, so that sounds like it should be a right laugh.

Thursday, look to take it easy.

Then it’s a three day weekend. Another Bank Holiday. I’m not sure if I have any other big plans, so I’m tentatively hoping to get in a 2 hour+ ride there. Ideally up and around Beacon Fell or similar. It’s so lovely round that way, particularly on a hot day.

Fingers crossed.

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