It's been a month since my last proper race of the year, World Marathon Championships. Since then I've been doing some epic mountain bike rides on some of my favourite local trails. It's felt a bit strange not doing the usual end of season races like Azores and LaTramun but I felt mid-September was a good time to finish the season having done so many multi day stage races this year. The last month has seen very limited structured training, just having fun during this awesome autumn! The dry dusty trails at home have been absolutely amazing, who'd have thought it would be almost mid-October and we'd be wiping dust off the bike rather than great British mud! It's been fun to do some extra coaching club rides, perfect timing to catch up with clients and start making plans for 2019. Today we did an absolute epic ride, it started in torrential rain for the first hour and we were soaked through, completely unexpected. Then I snapped my chain and it took ages to fix, we were close to turning back. Then the sun came out so we carried on to meet up with a coaching client and a couple more friends after 3 hours. I’m so glad we carried on because it turned out to be the best ride for a long time, it’s was one of those rides we’ll look back on end of the year and think yer that was awesome! 7 hours 5 minutes and 100 miles mountain biking with some absolutely amazing trails I hadn’t ridden for many years. Made some memories today! The legs are pretty cooked but I’m already looking forward to the next epic ride.
There's been a couple of off-road heart rate based workouts thrown into the mix the past few weeks but I've been enjoying doing these threshold efforts so after a long season they really don't feel like a chore. Sometimes at the end of a long season you have to choose the workouts you enjoy rather than what's possibly going to produce the best fitness or power improvements. Been enjoying getting back into the gym at Castle Royle and yesterday I did my first power based bike workout in over a month, some VO2 max efforts to start finding a bit of autumn power before Red Bull Timelaps. The event in 2 weeks is a 25 hour road relay event around Windsor Great Park. I've entered 2 Ben Thomas Coaching Club teams so it should be a great social way to sign off the season with client and friends. If you're in the area pop by the SIMPLON stand to say hi, I expect there'll be plenty of caffeinated drinks!
The Understanding Training Peaks series on MarathonMTB and How To Survive series on my website seem to be inspiring people and lots of new clients are signing up for coaching and the BEMC Pro Race Camp. Looking forward to working with these new clients and helping them achieve their sporting goals.
Late September I travelled to Birmingham for the Cycle Show. It was a great opportunity to catch up with existing sponsors and meet potential new ones. There was some very nice bike bling on display, the new Rotor UNO mountain bike groupset looks pretty awesome. Lots of talks going on with sponsors right now and much work ahead but hopefully it'll all pay off. The 2019 UCI calendar is now online, there’s some great events on the list so I’m excited to make plans but will have to wait till the team stuff is signed off.
On Wednesday I'm heading up to Fort William for World 24 Hour Championships where I'll be looking after one of my coaching clients. I've never been to Fort William so I'm pretty excited to visit this historic mountain bike venue and ride some of the trails. If there's phone signal I'm hoping to put up some decent social media from the event.
Hope you’re enjoying the off season and feel a little bit inspired from my blog to start planning your 2019 season. Next week there’ll hopefully be some very exciting news to announce so keep tuned on my social media channels!
