Looking back over the past couple of months of blog entries it's clear that I'm a bit obsessed by the weather, however this weekend was the craziest yet. I'd had a good week of training and was looking forward to the weekend, with a 6 hour ride planned for Saturday and a 2.5 hour run on Sunday.
I knew it wasn't going to be warm on Saturday so got up and put on every item of clothing that I could find! A few weeks back I really struggled with getting through too much liquid and running short so decided to take my camelback as well as some water bottles on the bike to make sure that I had enough liquid.
Erika was off to do her massage course for the weekend and she left about 20 minutes before me, just as I was about to leave she called me to tell me that the car was reading -7! It didn't look too bad at home though, there wasn't really too much frost around and I was all ready to go so decided to head out anyway and see how it was.
Well, it was cold!! I thought I'd give it half an hour of riding to see if I warmed up and to be honest after half an hour I didn't feel too bad, face was a bit cold but body seemed to be working ok. It was at that point that I tried to have some water from the camelback, that was completely frozen. So I thought I'd get some from a waterbottle instead, again completely frozen within 30 minutes of being outside. By this point I was down into Kent and could now understand where the -7 had come from, everything was completely white with frost, I should have stopped to take a picture but I don't think I would have started again!!
I decided that 6 hours out in that with no liquid was probably not a very good idea so changed my route so that I would only cover about 70km before being back home. Going uphill was fine as the wind chill eased a bit but as one point I was doing 55km/h going downhill and I thought my fingers were going to fall off they were so cold!! The last 45 minutes were not too much fun, was starting to get thirsty by then as well!!
When I was on the bike I thought I'd get home and do an hours run instead but I got in and got changed into my running stuff but still felt frozen. With a long run planned for Sunday and the memory of being ill for a week last time I pushed a bit too hard I thought it would be more sensible to give the urn a miss.
I spent a couple of hours on Saturday putting on the Polar power meter for my bike that Erika got me for my birthday.
Sunday's run was good, dead slow but I went out with the plan to run an even pace for the whole 2.5 hours, I ran out for 75 minutes and got back in 75 minutes and 9 seconds so I think that is pretty good!
I'm now back to work so have had to juggle my training plan around a bit. I'll be pretty busy for the next few months so I am not going to schedule any sessions in the evenings as I know that I'll end up missing them and just get frustrated so I am going to try and get up most mornings to do something before work and if I get the chance to do anything in the evening then that is a bonus.
First bonus was yesterday when I managed to get to the pool by about 7, forgot that it is the start of January so there were about 28 million people in the gym, wasn't too bad in the pool though.
This morning I went out for an hours ride before coming home, swapping bikes and then riding in to work. It was a tropical 8 degrees which made a nice change, batteries were running down on my front light though which made some of the unlit sections of road a bit dodgy!
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