I do have a new thing in my diary which I very much must train for now though. I have one of those friends that has a way of making crazy things happen; almost always involving a kayak. She is half the reason I ended up doing DW a couple of years ago, she involved me with the Abbotsbury Swan Drive a few years back as well, and now I am on a team of four to kayak across the channel for the Diamond DofE challenge.
I have been drafted in as a replacement for someone who has been forced to drop out. All of the preparation seems to have either been done or is in hand and I think I am just going to be the stoker for one of the K2s. If I’m honest I feel like a bit of a fraud, swooping in after the work has been done to simply claim the glory.
Anyway, I am going to be paddling a K2 and I’m going to have to get used to working as a team so I joined one of their training sessions this weekend. It made me realised that this challenge was going to be a bit greater than turning up and paddling for a few hours. The boats we will be using are very heavy, not particularly fast and I found the seat really uncomfortable. The idea of having to drive one for 8+ hours at sea is losing its appeal. I should be able to sort out the seating position to make it a bit more comfortable, but it is still going to be a hard slog: We were out for two and a half hours on Saturday and only managed 14kms. By comparison, in the racing K1 I would have doubled that distance.
At some point during the session, I’m not sure if it was while paddling or lifting the cumbersome boat, I aggravated a shoulder injury I have been carrying for a little while. It was an annoying niggle last week but I think it’s fair to say it’s a full blown injury now. I might need to seek professional help to get it fixed before the crossing attempt.
The next medal event for me though is the Ride London 100 in not very many weeks time so I also went out for a training ride with a couple of friends on Sunday. In total I covered about 60kms with quite a lot of climbing which was good to throw at the legs, I did struggle a bit but I think I can still blame the marathon a bit for my lack of peak performance.
I don’t usually talk too much about my times and speeds and other metrics on this blog as I think it can get a bit boring but this number is a concern. In total on this weekend’s ride, my average speed was 20.2km/h. The Ride 100 has a cut off time of eight and a half hours, and is 100 miles long. Assuming that my average speed will be similar on the day, I will finish the event in 8 hours. That only leaves thirty minutes for feed station stops, toilet breaks and potentially any mechanical issues. Having completed a few sportives I know that a lot of time can be lost at feed stations. I’m either going to have to ride faster… Or miss some of the feed stations.
The weather looks to be on the turn for the better so I am down one excuse for not doing any training this coming week…
You did 70k on the bike Sunday. But the loop with J was an average of 17.9km/hr so I think that when riding at our usual pace the rest of the ride we were comfortably at 22km/hr. But even at 20km hr, we will be fine, the buzz will pull us along too.
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