Tour Down Under - Stage 4

151 days to go....
Andrew and I decided a few weeks back (ok I decided and he eventually agreed) that we would do Stage 4 of the Tour Down Under this year.
Now I'm not much of a cyclist, but we did buy the nice road racing bikes for triathlons - so why not. The choices of distance were really either 32kms or 97kms. We have been contemplating riding from home into Port Pirie (where we work) for some time now on the weekends, and this is 32kms, so the shorter distance didnt seem like enough of a challenge. So 97kms it is.

I started training for it this week - particularly as with the calf injury its another form of exercise that's low impact.

Given the weather I'm doing this at the gym. Did 5 mins on the bike and could start to feel it already - yikes - thats not good. But 5 mins on this and then 5 on the recumbent - which is much more comfortable - and then every day adding by 5 mins. The last few days I've been doing half an hour at 90 - 100 rpms - and covering 12 kms quite comfortably. I know the recumbent isn't the same as riding my bike - but at the moment I just want to get my legs used to spinning at speed over time. (An interesting side note - I'm not putting on any resistance - but I didn't think it would have such a low impact on my heart rate - it rarely goes over 100 - generally sitting at about 95). Then on Sunday - I hopped on the real thing and went for a ride.
I did 14 kms in 37mins, which is about an average of 23kms/hr. I was much faster in the first half - seeing 28/30kms/hr quite often - but in the second half I had a head wind and I was much slower. I don't know how much this had to do with the head wind - or just me tiring. At the 10 km mark I thought - gee only need to do this 10 times over on the day..... At the moment that seems quite impossible - but as you know I love a challenge

I know nothing about cycling training - but I'm just going to treat it as an endurance event, and use the same principles. I think I will train in the gym during the week at the moment due to the short days/bad weather, and then do one long ride each weekend, increasing by 3 - 5 kms each time. If I increase by 5, I can probably afford to have a maintenance week once/month to give my body some time to recuperate. I might try and put up a weekly log/table of my training distances, but I've forgotten how to do this - so if any knows - can you drop me a line?

And on the gadget front - I've decided to buy the foot pod for my Garmin -so I can measure my running indoors. I then plan to buy the cadence sensor for my bike and eventually the quick release wrist strap for quickly changing it from my bike to my wrist - but I don't really need this yet until I set another date for a triathlon. Oooh I loooove gadgets!