INDOORS AND OUT OF THE RAIN

So this is July and it’s supposed to be summer….but it’s not yet arrived. The weather is foul, cold and rainy. Living in Manchester this is to be expected but only to a certain degree. As an athlete who has spent almost 10 years training outdoors, it is almost crucial to physical and mental well being that there are at least two months in the year spent training in hotter and drier conditions than the other ten miserable months of the year. We all know that last summer was a wash out. One bad year is tolerable but two is not. Hence I became a hermit and a full time indoor cyclist over the past month. My competition event being on the track means I get a reprieve from the outdoors every now and then which is good - but sometimes it’s just not sufficient. Some might say that substituting road training for turbo training is madness. Masochistic even! But that is me! I’d much rather batter myself and bore myself senseless looking at the same view (a white fan blowing air over me to cool me down and a data box mounted on my handlebars) than get drenched by the rain, smashed in the face by the wind and chilled to the bone by the cold. Oh, and not forgetting the dicing with death when fighting it out with other road users for a bit of space on the roads. At lest when training in the gym I can crank out some motivational tunes on the stereo. Whilst on the road the only music to my ears I get whilst on the road is ‘BEEP-BEEP’ and the revving of engines by impatient drivers.

So before I start grumbling about a whole new topic of ‘crazy drivers’ I better tell you that the photos I have included are a couple of snaps of me in the gym on my time trail bike warming up before a good hard session. They are only of the warm up because I’m not showing the grotty hellish state that I get myself into during the real hard grippy stuff. That wouldn’t be fair on the readers!