23 - 21 Magnificat Newbury

I am still a wee bit 'cream crackered' after the 82 mile event today. Earlier stats on this 'standard' ride - the Epic was 124 miles - said that the elevation was 2595 feet - not exactly a walk in the park - but much less than the Ride100. The ride actually gained 4190 feet and included rather a lot of unexpected hillage. As a result, today's ride was shorter but hillier than the Ride100. I'd wanted to do it in 6 hours as this would be the pace for my 7.5 hours for August 4th. I sped in at 6 hours and 4 minutes, 17 minutes outside the event's silver classification. This 17 minutes was the time I spent faffing about in the feed stations. I'd spent a ridiculous 10 minutes at the first doing running repairs to the bike. One of the essential bottles cages was preventing me going into low gear - I chucked that cage in bin. Then there was the case of The Hastily Put On Cycle Computer: I had managed to strap it to the handle bars back to front. The rush to get off in the morning had been a rush and I hadn't had time to set the cycle computer to Mph and so I spent the best part of the ride trying to work out how many miles made up 24 km - my average speed.

I was a bit pooped at the end as I'd not organised my eating and drinking too well - this was my first ever 'event'. The lesson will be learned.

Earlier in the week I did a couple of runs to five the muscles some variety.
That is the end of the training.
On Friday I head to France, Portsmouth to Caen, so as to cross over to Marseilles, after taking a train to Le Mans: about 585 miles.

Week: 138 on bike
11 running.