Following on from my last blog - Riding & Ranting - I decided to head down to the inlaw's to ride in the same area as the Blenheim Bike ride. It's an area I know fairly well and I used to use some of the hills in the area to train back when I was racing.
As you may be aware, from the last blog post, that I can't stand Killjoy's or people that try to implement rules based on their own petty prejudice rather than solid fact. The banning of MP3's, they claim, is for safety and when I pointed out the fact that deaf people still ride and perfectly safely they just came up with some stupid counter that had no basis in fact and so I did decide not to ride that event this time or ever in the future.
I decided to head up into the same area though - the area around Stow On The Wold. I headed from Middle Littleton through Honeybourne and then up the wonderful Fish Hill. I love that climb, it's long - over 3 miles, and steep in places at 10% plus. It was one of the hills I always used to train on in my racing days and it became something of a tradition to ride up it. I was taking it easy as it's towards the start of the ride and I was planning to do 60 lumpy miles - that was until some chap decided to overtake me. I don't race anymore, I'm too fat and slug like - but for some strange reason I'm still competative. I checked out his gearing and saw that he was running conventional racing ratio gears and he looked like he was making really hard work out of it - and we hadn't hit the steep stuff yet! So, I sat on his wheel and let him work, I was spinning nicely on my compact chainset and just keeping my heart rate down, then he slowed so I was forced to go past him keeping my tempo even. Then, I just rode away from him.........and at the top, I upped my gear and rode way even faster! Poor bloke.
Well, the ride was stunning. Cloudy and cool to start with but soon brightening up, lightish SW winds and I knew that the last few miles would have a tail wind. I rode up and over the hills round Stow and then hit the fast descent from Ford on the Tewksbury road. From there I headed over to Bredon and round the back of Bredon Hill, the last 25 miles were a nice tail wind, well, more of a breeze really but nice none the less.
Evesham is a wonderful little town and nice to ride through on a Sunday and so I did, getting motorpaced by some guy on a big sports motorcycle who happened to be sticking to the speed limit! Good fun that, the last short climb of the day at Bennetts Hill was done quickly and the last couple of miles to the inlaws was taken easy.
A great day, with good music, great weather and stunning scenery. I tried to make a short video using my mobile phone, it's not brilliant, but check it out. I intend to get a better helmet/bike mounted camera for next year and I'll start adding videos of rides and routes.
Here is the Endomondo workout for that day. I did a ride the following day but was shattered and just did a short easy one - and, I've just been out and done a nice hard 26 miles before nights, both workouts are listed on the Endomondo page August 22nd and 25th.
Oh, and here is the video!
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