Well, my posts have been few and far between for the simple reason there ain’t much cycling going on right now. What to say that hasn’t already been said about winter training? Basically, it boils down to what your aims are in terms of cycling, and my No. 1 aim is to be out there on a nice sunny day riding through the hills, dales and forests of Serbia. That just isn’t going to be happening soon (though I must mention the notable exception of one day last week when it hit 14 degrees C and I hit the road!)

Last years goals

But I do have some secondary goals, and did have last year too. One of them was to put in a half-decent time in the May Fruška Gora Big Marathon (like, under 6 hours!) Unfortunately I didn’t come close to achieving this - I got ill that very week, hadn’t trained nearly enough and the weather was absolutely atrocious, with the whole hill range turned to mud and EVERYBODY’S times up by at least 25%. The result was that I only raced the Small Marathon (31km) with the sole aim of just getting round, which I did, though probably exacerbating the flu which proceeded to last longer than it should have.

I also did a lot of other really awesome stuff, like this, this and this, which I really can’t complain about!

Tackling the Big One

But the 80km Big Marathon was still niggling me so toward the end of the season, after a fair bit of intensive training, I decided to do the route on my own, just to see how I would do.

Well, to cut an 80 km story short: not too well. I blazed the first half and seemed to be well on track for a 5-hour time, which would have been ridiculously good for me. But it was not to be - it WAS already a bit late in the season and the leaves and mud were building up, I had several technical problems and more to the point my endurance seemed to be lacking. The second half of the course was FAR harder than I remembered, with some really dodgy churned-up sections, and more to the point seeming endless uphill sections (and a few really hairy downhills too) and it just went on and on!

In the end it actually started getting dark and I had to ditch the last few km, but it was clear I would have made no improvement on my first attempt, two years ago. Pretty depressing!

This year, though..!

I still want to crack that race and prove to myself I can do it! In ideal conditions I think I could do a lot better, but the fact remains that my long-distance endurance seems to be questionable and that I have to do some more work on that. Could be age catching up with me, could also be my metabolism, which demands constant feeding even when I am static! Presumably I burn calories like there’s no tomorrow when I am really working hard. So I guess the key is to get more of those “base” rides in at this time of year - and those are the ones that are the least fun to do indoors on a trainer or whatever (2-3 hours pedalling indoors! Come on..! You need serious motivation for that!) Well, I will let you know how I get on, and also what I’ve been doing to stay fit this winter - maybe we can bounce some ideas around.

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Posted on January 28th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: MTB Serbia (All)