Steady pace finishes the race....

Hello to all

Ready to go on saturday morning

Tony and Ren here. We hope you had a productive Easter training. Ren and I spent Easter Sat/Sun cycling with Nigel and Lisa. Adorned in our snazzy new London to Monte Carlo gear, we met at Nigel's house on Sat at 10.30am for a nice training ride where we were met by Nigel's strapping personal trainer Rob, who is an "Ironman" and as the name suggests is a bit of a superhero, with a body like Batman!

Rob helping out as he does

Ren, looking at me with a face like a smacked arse, suggesting "shall we push the trip back to 2014, because my legs aint gonna look like that in 3 weeks!". Regardless, after we got over the initial shock of our Ironman welcome, we reluctantly mounted our bikes and began our Easter training.

Anyway, even though it was early morning - as my body language shows ..... aided by Rob the trainer, we set off on our weekend "little jaunt".

Awake and ready....

I'm coming stop hassling.......

We cycled just under 50 miles on Saturday and followed that with a further 25 miles on Sunday. We managed the distance pretty comfortably to be honest and really enjoyed the training. But this was only because of one key thing ....... we have totally realised one very important lesson over the past 3-4 weeks as our training has intensified and this weekend's rides completely reinforced it, and that "it" is STEADY PACE FINISHES THE RACE!!

The difference between maintaining a constant 11.5 to 12 miles per hour versus increasing and decreasing speed en route as others scamper away and we play catch up is HUGE. Rob our trainer continually told us we had started too fast and forced us into a steady constant sustainable pace. He explained that the thing about endurance cycling we all must acknowledge if we are to complete our journey is that if we do not hold our speed and resist the frequent temptation to increase the pace and race, we will simply never finish. Rob explained that by not regulating pace you will use larger muscles and burn your energy up far too quickly to last out an endurance event. In our opinion we really must continually remind our selves whilst riding especially in the first 4-5 days when excitement levels are greater that it is a marathon not a sprint.

It's hard to make yourself cycle slower at times when you feel energetic in the moment and maybe a little slow, yet we have to preserve our fuel tanks for latter days, as none of us have cycled more than 4-5 days back to back covering 60-65mls per day. One technique that Rob got us to do was proper "peloton" riding where we all start off in a line then after say a mile, the front person peels off and slowly goes to the back. By constantly doing this, everyone got a turn at the front, it became far more interesting but most important of all it forced everyone to keep the same pace as the guy at the front went to the back every mile or so. This technique really worked and we will be strongly encouraging George to try it out again next weekend. It enabled the four of us to cycle as a team, at a constant pace and we loved it. Really loved it. 

To be honest, having seen now what we've seen, Ren and I will be plodding at 11.5 to 12miles per hour throughout regardless of what goes on around us, as we want to finish, we want to do the whole nine yards and we know its the only way. With the peleton technique this is absolutely possible. 

Thanks to Nigel and Paula for their hospitality and to Nigel and Rob for an invaluable lesson this weekend. It really was brilliant. We've got the bug, we understand what we have to do and we are "on it" big time.

See many of you at George's next weekend and the rest very soon in Greenwich for an adventure none of us will ever forget!!

Ren and Tony xx