by On Tuesday I wanted to go out for a long ride – my work day was fairly quiet and the sun was out, and I desperately needed to get back into the swing of things. The first 60km or so I rode with Geoff, and our pace was OK, and by the time we went our separate ways I was still feeling pretty good, having not done any silly sprint efforts to go for KOMs. I did have a few steep hills in my legs though (steep for me, anyway) and I probably wasn’t eating enough at this point. I also stopped for 5 minutes at 80km to chat to a couple of friends, after which things started to get a bit tricky. The last 10km was very hard, I had to force myself to do another loop in order to push myself over the 100km mark!
Afterwards I was very tired, but the endorphins helped cover for that for an hour or so. After that it was a struggle to get to the kids’ bedtime, let alone mine! Still, it was my first metric century for many months, and my longest ride since last July (Southend-London-Southend), a week after which I was in hospital. I probably won’t get a chance to do such a long ride for a couple of weeks now, but I just have to keep the training up – I’ve decided to follow the plans from Cycling Weekly which promise you can get fit in 4 hours a week, we’ll see how it goes.