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A Busy Few Weeks

The last few weeks have been fairly busy, although I’ve not had any races my training has been improving and various other events have kept me occupied. The majority of the snow dumped around Christmas finally thawed out mid-January which meant I could finally get back on the road bike and start getting some serious training done. Up until the thaw all I was able to do was get on the Raven MTB with Schwalbe snow stud tyres and ride around the back roads. I wasn’t able to add any structure to the training which was very frustrating.

After such a long spell off the road bike I was seriously motivated and have put in a couple of big training weeks. One of the major benefits of the Powertap hub I am using is that you can keep a very close check on effort and the intensity of rides, which helps with future training plans and also should help prevent any possible over-training which is very possible as such an early point in the year.

We moved house (again!) and the change has been very positive. We have moved to a great house in a superb location, although not that far from where we were before. The Mountain Biking is not quite as close as before, but just 2 miles along the road gets me to the best local riding and much more on offer to create longer rides. The road riding however is the real gem, with quiet rural roads heading out in every direction offering plenty of harder and easier routes.

To allow us to complete the house move and also to get a big training week in I took a week off work and kept my fingers firmly crossed that the weather would hold out. Thankfully the weather played ball, and although it was cold all week it stayed dry on all but one day. I’ve not ridden many rides further than 40-50 miles recently, so I was keen to prove to myself that I still have the endurance to stay in the saddle for long periods. I planned my week to include 3 separate 100+ mile rides, which would hopefully be a big boost for both my fitness and my confidence. With the week now complete I am really pleased to have completed all 3 rides, each with over 2000m of climbing. The final ride was on a really windy day and really took it out of me, but I am very pleased with how it all went.

On Wednesday I attended the Carmarthenshire Sports Awards, as I was one of 3 people who had been short-listed in the Sports Personality award. I was very honoured to be nominated, especially against such prolific athletes: David Greene, International 400m hurdler and Mike Phillips, Wales and British Lions Rugby player. I didn’t win the award, but had a great night and enjoyed the experience.

To end a very busy week I travelled to Cannock on the weekend to meet and ride with DH legend Steve Peat, as the final part of the prize for winning the Garmin Academy competition way back at BikeRadar Live last May. Steve himself was a true gent and every bit as nice as people have said. He spent all day with us, doing some riding and a bit of technical coaching. I had a great weekend riding and came away a better rider.

Moving into the next few weeks I am hoping to mix a few more longer rides while also starting some more intensive sessions done. But as I am writing this we have a fresh dump of the white stuff which may cause a few more problems!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under Athlete Diaries, Matthew Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.