Our guest blogger Ant Collier – discusses his preparations for the Haute Route Pyrenees.
I was pretty chuffed to get the facebook message from La Fuga telling me I’d won an Haute Route Pyrenees Trip as a result of winning the Wattbike challenge at the London Bike Show! I couldn’t believe it and was absolutely ecstatic.
Then I looked at what it was. Oh, this isn’t a nice chilled out ride, it’s pretty daunting. Ok actually it’s pretty scary!
Now I’m not too bad at riding but this will be a completely new level for me. I am also pretty committed to coaching at Hoddesdon Triathlon Club (yeah yeah tri jokes etc), so time constraints will certainly play a part. I also live in Hertfordshire, on the Border with Cambridgeshire and Essex, not an area associated with mountainous terrain to train on.
First things first I quickly organised how best to show off to fellow cyclists what I had won. I promptly told everyone in the club, the family, everyone at work and then any tenuous links or distant relations I had about the trip. I’m pretty sure I’ve then mentioned it every day since.
Excitement has turned into a daunting respect for the challenge ahead. I am training for it I suppose, I am being fairly sensible and just concentrating on training consistently. At the moment I’m probably clocking up 6-8 hours on the bike, including the local club 10 and a few turbo sessions. I have been diligently reading ways to get ready for the seven day challenge and all of them seem to simply say ride up mountains a lot. Hmmm, that’s basically what I can’t do!
I’m also running quite a bit (true velominati roadies look aside) in an attempt to squeeze in a bit more training. I can get three or four runs in during the week at work so I’m hoping this will help at least in the training volume.
So the training plan is essentially ride as much as and when I get the chance, but also constantly remind people about the fact I am going on the trip, I feel some people are getting quite good a tuning it out though.
So training log for this week – 4 hour club run, 1:30 min turbo and the club 10, oh and quite a few beers on Saturday. I’ll keep you posted with how the training goes over the next few months before the big event takes place from 30 August – 8 September 2014.