Cycling Fitness and the London Phoenix Easter Classic

I bought a new book the other day (well, days – it came from alibris.co.uk) which caught my eye – The Cyclists Training Bible. I’d never seen it before, but it looked interesting and when it arrived was a considerably weightier tome than I was expecting. There’s some good stuff in there, which started me thinking about actually structuring some training for this year’s events (as at last count, there are three major ones).

So, step one, instead of guesstimating my maximum heart rate, the guy recommends doing a Lactic Threshold Heart Rate test. This is pretty simple – cycle full pelt for 30 minutes and (using a heart rate monitor) get your average heart rate for the last 20. Then there’s a massive table for working out a set of heart rate zones. Haven’t really started using the zones yet, but I did the test on Saturday around Richmond Park. It hurt. In case you want to know what pain looks like – here’s a graph (oh, the dips are when I got stuck in traffic):

I avoided some cycling over the weekend to build out a training plan – so let’s see how things progress on that front. In the meantime, I happened across a message on the London Dynamo forum that mentioned an Easter Classic sportive on the Monday. The weather looked good. The course was pretty flat (by all accounts). The only real pain point was a tendency for headwinds. Oh, and somebody from the club did it in 3h 20mins last year.

I set off, bright and early on Monday morning. Joined the big queue to sign on. Said hello to a couple of other London Dynamo riders who were around, but kind of kept myself to myself as I was planning on a fairly gentle run (I was supposed to be going mountain biking in Epping the same evening). As tends to happen though, I got talking to a bunch of guys some of whom had these pretty cool “skate” something jerseys on. We decided to set off together, so rolled over the timing mat and headed off up the road. It was a short while in that I realised we were going at quite a pace. It was only then that I actually bothered to read one of the jerseys (that had been right in front of me the whole time) – London Skating – Speed Team… hmmm… This isn’t going to be a gentle ride after all (thankfully, after a day off, I wasn’t feeling too bad myself). So, instead of quietly rolling round the course, we completed it in 4h (including 15 minutes while people caught back up at the halfway point, and another 15 when I hit a big pothole blowing a tyre, rotating my handlebars about 15 degrees and, as I realised a bit later, poleaxing my wheels).

A tough ride, but great company and an unexpected result. Thanks guys.