New Year, New Job

This week thus far has been rather interesting.

For one, I started a new job working within the environment I love but within a very different environment.  With a working week under the belt, so far so very good with smiling people and a wonderful resonance about the place.

I'm genuinely smitten.

For afters this is my first little taper / drop down week of the new year.  Last week I put in a solid 11hr on the bike and covered close to 380kms with plenty of hours at tempo and above.

This week will have me put in perhaps 7 - 8 hours in the saddle all at a very gentler endurance pace before looking to build up the pace and hours for another 3 week training cycle.

Fun.

A Fresh Bidon Every Time...

It's almost time to put away the steriliser..... or is it?

With our little person about to celebrate his first birthday in a few days, Mrs T has informed me to get ready to man up so to speak and to find the step ladder from the shed.  I'm told it's time to hide the steriliser in the loft with the rest of our junk.

I understand after the first birthday, it's no longer imperative to formally sterilise a young person's feeding bottle for each sitting.  I suppose there's some logic to this.  After all, I doubt very many if any adult, bar those compulsively obsessed with cleanliness perhaps, would do something similar with each and everyone of their water tumblers?  

However, I've delayed the no doubt inevitable trip up into the cold and spider infested attic having discovered a secondary use case for said steriliser.  

Bidon cleaning.

Mouldy bottle innards be gone! Works like a charm.

A secondary use case for our redundant steriliser

Two Hours of Nowhere

While my part of the UK remains relatively untouched by the recent storms that have battered much of the country, it's still been a little too breezy for me to venture further on the bike than my front room.

I've written before on why I quite enjoy riding a turbo so I'm not planning on spending any more time looking to justify an activity that many people would rather see removed from the field of human invention.

In any case, todays session was a simple 1 hour ride at tempo with 2 intervals of 10 mins at FTP late in the session.  For the most part everything went well until the second of the FTP efforts when the fact that I'd not consumed any food in the past hour and a half caught up with me.

I'll call it a mini bonk although it was big enough so to speak for me to bail out of the last internal after 7 mins.  Despite, or in spite of this little mishap, I really enjoyed todays ride.

Of course, come July I'll be needing to ride this sort of tempo pace for over 2 hours so clearly, there's still much to be done.

WKO+ analysis of todays session

Early 2012 - Gently Does it

Today I went for my first outdoor ride of 2012.  While much of the UK was battered overnight and throughout the day with gale force winds, we seem to have avoided anything more than a stiff breeze, with the sum damage to the local area being it's ability to knock over a few peoples vast piles of New Year's recycling into the gutters.

As I'm still on holiday, I waited until latish in the afternoon before getting the warm trousers, gloves and coat ready.  There seemed little point in starting the year too hard so I set off and maintained a simple and easy pace well into the endurance zone (i.e. 180 - 220 watts).

With speed and effort being somewhat irrelevant to the ride I spent the best part of an hour and a half simply pottering around the outskirts of Newbury before heading home to a steaming cup of tea that Mrs T had already made in anticipation of my return.

A wonderful start to the riding year and no doubt come my planned dose of FTP testing later in the week, a ride I'd be happy to repeat over and over again.

A junction in The Ridegway, not far from West IIsley

A very happy New Year!

Here's hoping everyone had a cracking New Year eve?

Mine was the usual sort of thing that anyone with an almost 1 year old can get up to - i.e. we stayed in with the TV watched Jools Holland's Hootenanny before topping this off with fireworks along the Thames.  Both were quite honestly riveting viewing....

We were, as in me Mrs T & Master T, back in Guernsey which made a nice little change although the weather was quite dour.  I took the bike across to the island with the best intentions although I only managed a solitary ride of a little over an hour and a half - which is about the same time it takes to pack the damn thing away.

Evoc vs T-Rex

But anyway. Now I'm back in the UK with the bike unpacked and for some reason here with me in our front room.  It's high time I went for a little leg spinner.

2012 training starts in ernest tomorrow.