The ride in went well enough; with the exception of me starting late and getting slightly lost. It was a dreary, windy, grizzly day and by the time I was close enough to the school for my map, sellotaped to the rather ungainly flying gear cables sticking out the sides of my Sora shifters, to become useful, it had already become several smaller, damper, bits of map. With the poor weather and the lack of direction, I couldn't take advantage of the following wind, not wanting to arrive at the school smelling like a boil-in-the-bag steamed fish. (I really can't understand people who cycle in coats by choice. Half the time I end up as drenched on the inside as if I had just exposed myself to the rain. Bit warmer, though).
Riding back, I had originally planned to head north to Sterling and across, to extend things to a proper training run. By the time the first mile had passed, I was through with that idea.
Cycling into a headwind is far and away the most demoralising thing you can do on a bike. You can't get that same sense of flow as you get when climbing a mountain, and you are always, always in the wrong gear. In the end I just gave up on shifting - if all gears were equally wrong in the gusts and squalls, it was easier just to stick to one. Completely lacking motivation, I allowed myself to take it easy, and was rewarded by an average speed that dropped the wrong side of 25kph. This was terrible. I wasn't even sure I wanted to upload such a ride - the effect it would have on my monthly average speed would surely cripple the trend, unless I pulled some pretty impressive rides in the next couple of weeks.
Today, then, I got home after work just in time for it to start drizzling. Again. Refusing to kowtow to the vagaries of the Scottish climate, I pulled on a high-vis vest as concession to the fact that wearing almost completely grey gear on a black bike on a day like today might be a little low-contrast, I set off to do some hills.
It's surprising to me, as someone who hasn't been in Scotland for long, that there are fairly few decent climbs, especially around the northern Glasgow area. Tak-ma-doon is probably the longest, steepest climb within twenty miles (probably more), and even that is only a matter of about 300 hundred metres in 4 or 5 kilometres - at any rate, around 15 minutes of climbing, and it's an almost entirely level run in to get there. I'm probably going to have to increasingly turn to hill repeats to get my legs ready for Wales.
I set a couple of vague targets for myself, but given the conditions, they ended up being too easy. The first was to reach the foot of Tak-ma-doon at an average of 20mph or above, and with the strong westerly wind, I could to that with my feet practically off the pedals (well, not quite that easy. I did get a nice thrill from blasting past someone on a white... can't remember now, who was holding up traffic a bit. Again, I'd rather expected him to take the challenge, and my wheel, and move on a bit, but I guess I just keep overestimating the motivations of other riders).
The second target was just to attack the hills hard. This I could do, but I can't honestly claim to have reached the top any faster than on previous rides. Indeed, I'm struggling to see much improvement in my climbing yet. I'm about a 6th of the way through my training period, but I'm not a 6th of the way to bridging the gap in my threshold power, or average speed, or race weight. Every time I go out now, I think "today, I take it to the next level". Then, at some point in the ride, I remember - there isn't one. I'm going as fast as I can. I want to go faster. The only way to go faster is to keep going as fast as I can. That's all there is.
I hope it's enough.
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