Every Sunday we get an email reviewing the day’s ride, announcements, words of advice and sometimes also words or reprimand. There’s always something to take from it, like nutrition advice, bike position tips and important upcoming dates.
In this week’s email there was something that struck me on sight – the email’s subject. “Fifteenth Sunday ride review.” Fifteen weeks have come and gone and we’re now on the final week of intensive training before the tapering phase. In other words, its just three weeks to go!!
Back to the present … today we had our second time trial. I guess I haven’t really talked about the first one yet … so here comes some background. On Sunday 20th June, we had a time trial to gauge our progress. The route for the time trial starts off from the Qormi-Mriehel bypass and takes us up to Dingli through Saqqajja i.e. always going up. The aim was to do the route in less than 30mins, but I knew this was going to be tough given my knee problems. I managed it 31 mins 18 secs and finished 33rd out of 38.
So, needless to say, this time I wanted to get a better result. Unfortunately we had a strong head wind today, and we got told that the target today is to keep it under 35 mins and that 30 mins would be a good time. My starting position is fifth (we’re starting from the slowest time trial results), and with 30 mins set as my target I set out on to the Mriehel bypass. The wind is strong and I try to make myself as small as possible on the bike to avoid as much wind resistance as possible, but I can still feel myself fighting this extra resistance. As I turn off the bypass towards Attard, the wind drops a bit and I push to overtake two cyclists. I know this is a race against one’s own time, but the physiological boost I got from the overtaking was priceless. Leaving Attard behind I start clibming towards Saqqajja and along the way I manage to push myself in front of the other two cyclists which gives me added energies to tackle the last part of Saqqajja hill. When I get to the top, my heart rate is at 190 and my body is screaming for a break. No time to stop now and as I push myself on I realise that there’s no one in front of me. At that point I get a bit worried that I might slack off with no one to set the pace, so in true army-recruit-training style I start screaming insults at myself. It seems to work! Fuelled by these insults (a couple of which were directed at others) I manage to get to the finish line without anyone physically overtaking me! The feeling was great, and then I look at my stop watch and I’m ecstatic. I managed the trial in 28 mins 21 secs. That’s about a 3 minute improvement from last time and I now placed 20th out of 36 
On TuneIn today there was an article about me participating in the LifeCycle (I’m attaching a scan of the article with this post). So I must say today was a great day 
Here’s wishing for more 
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