It’s been another “light” week of training, and to be honest I was so pissed off with last weeks “bonk” (see previous blog post) during my ride, it left me with a lack of motivation this week. Of course what it should have done is motivated me to sort my training out and get out more. Anyway, my annoyance with myself is out-of-the-way now, and so this morning I decided to do a nice Endurance Pace ride for around 40 miles. A bit shorter than last week, and a bit of a “see how it goes” ride. But I was determined not to put myself under any pressure this morning and just ride my own pace. If I needed to cut it short, I allowed myself the ability to do that, so whatever I decided would be fine.
I actually felt quite good, a lot better than last weeks nightmare ride anyway. I could feel myself wanting to push along at pace in the first few miles, and had to restrain myself and apply a bit of self-discipline to stop myself from doing that. I knew it would bite me in the butt later on. But I was feeling good. My HR was a bit higher than I might normally expect, but again, no real surprise there given the lack of regularity in terms of training. All was going according to plan and I was just beginning to feel quite pleased with myself. I was approaching the point at which I fell last week, there was no danger of that happening today as the snow and ice has cleared, and its feeling Spring like at the moment. I looked down at my Garmin to check my Power output and as I looked at the screen, the Power numbers went blank! Spookily, in more or less the same place that it happened last week!
As you can imagine, much grumbling and swearing as I conveyed myself through the Kent countryside, and trying to figure out the problem as I went. In the end I just gave up and concentrated on HR as a guide for effort. But underneath my helmet and several layers of lycra, was a seething, angry and frustrated cyclist! Having completed my ride and got home, I just parked it up in the Garage, went for a shower and had breakfast. Caught up with the highlights of the Tour or Oman, and Algarve, before turning my attention back to the Power Meter. It just won’t pair with the Garmin! It’s recently had new batteries installed, it couldn’t be that could it? I got my multimeter out and checked the batteries and sure enough there was something no quite right with one of them (it takes two batteries), so I installed a new set, and its sprung back into life again. Lets hope it continues to do so, as I’m manually updating my TSS scores with numbers estimated by previous rides. Should be accurate enough, but it’s very annoying when your expensive toy decides not to work. Hopefully the new batteries will sort it out for me, if not, it will have to be sent off for proper investigation I suppose.
No real numbers to report as a result of the Power Meter failure, but average speed a decent 17.3 mph considering my lack of fitness, HR was high at 163 bpm, but assuming I can get out more regularly I would expect that to reduce fairly quickly.
This mornings ride……..
