Blog About Sam's Thoughts And Riting Diary

My original plan for this post was to summarise my winter training and preview the Catford 10. Obviously, given the outbreak of Covid-19, the race is off. So, in this post I'll muse about this winter's training, including balancing commuting, turbo, career and social life. In my last post in early December, I wrote about my work:life balance feeling askew.  Fortunately, the weeks leading up to the Christmas break were pretty quiet work wise, so I continued to ride a lot on the turbo during the week and get out on the TT bike, weather-permitting, on the weekends. I rarely rode to work during December. From memory there was a lot of rain and I just didn’t feel up to it as I started to wind down for Christmas. The Christmas break was great. I did some turbo sessions, rode outside a bit, ate lots of good food, spent time with friends/family and spent most of the break horizontal. In anticipation of work getting super busy again, I put coaching on hold tempora...

Following on from the last post, I wanted to write about the beginning of the off-season, the psychology that underpins everything I do on the bike and my pursuit to get faster by getting more aero and training smarter. Commuting Attitude Change I've noticed a shift in my mindset since returning to full time work. When I was at Greenwich, I commuted by bike almost exclusively. In fact, I did 42 successive bike commutes from January to when I finished in May. Since starting in Paddington in late July, I've cycled in on average twice a week. I had one hero week where I did it four times, which produced bulletproof legs and, as it was the week before Q50/11, turned out to be a decent boost of volume before I tapered. In November I only rode in five times. Things got quite busy at work and I didn't want to sacrifice the turbo sessions. I had a good chat with Neil Harris in the pub about whether to drop the turbo or commuting miles at this time of year (he fav...

Y axis = TSS. Apologies for not labeling my axes :( Before we get into the blog, I made me a little chart. Blue dots are weekly TSS score, red line is the cumulative average of the previous five weeks. I've picked out my five best performances. Blog posts are self-indulgent. Bloggers are narcissists. I am not exempt from either statement. The following post is going to be a loose collection of my thought processes mainly accrued into these coherent paragraphs in order to observe and attempt to look objectively at the situation I am in, and the decisions I have made. My memory can be really patchy (probably due to a head injury from a bike crash as a child) so this post serves as a permanent memory to which I can return with clarity and at least attempted objectivity. Having run my own PT studio for a few years, the concept of coaching wasn’t new to me. I did however feel there was a satisfaction to be had in beating riders that were coaches, or were coached themselves....

Across the weekend of 20-21 July, the Mersey Roads National 24 Hour Time Trial was held largely in Shropshire though it started in Cheshire and the last few hours were spent across the border in Wales. I attended in support of clubmate Martin Brown, who had completed the event unsupported(!) in 2017 and managed over 400 miles. The target this time around, with Coach Dave Truman, Richard Bryant and I there to support, was 435 miles or 700 kilometres. Richard collected me just after 8am as the rain began to lash down in Hitchen Hatch Lane. I had set my alarm two hours previous to get out for a quick bike ride and managed to miss any moisture coming from the air, though there was a bit of surface spray. The rain showers reduced visibility a little for the first hour or so of the drive, with a partial lane closure for surface water on the M25 (or possibly M40?). Once the rain stopped we made really good progress, getting to the rather small Warwick Services before 10am for a quick...

I woke up at 4:50am on a Sunday to drive for an hour in order to race my bike for 50 miles around the plains of South East Kent and the Far East of Sussex. The weekend life of a tester is a funny old thing. Congregating in a village hall, speaking in hushed tones in the adjacent car park and queuing out the door for the only toilet are all an integral part of the TT experience. I wouldn't change it. The way I am going to structure this blog post is to take what I had planned, in my blog post on Wednesday, and compare it to what I actually did. Power I am confident I will be able to maintain 270 watts for the duration. So. Much. Data. As the image shows, I surpassed the 270-watt target. The power meter dropped out (see below) for a total of about 50 seconds, so I think the power numbers might be more like 277 AP, 280 NP. I felt confident of maintaining 270, but I didn't think I would be able to maintain a NP of 277-280. Notice the flat purple lines Th...