Winter Training

I have always sort of enjoyed training in the winter, sometimes even more than training in the summer. I enjoy the process of it. Getting the base miles in, doing the tempo and sweet spot intervals and then towards February starting to do some higher intensity stuff to get some zip in the legs for the start of the season. Coming from a non-cycling family it had never really been a choice for me to go to a warmer country so have just slogged it out in the cold. Being on a gap year now I had had enough so booked a couple trips away to break up the winter.

My first trip was to Calpe where miraculously I was able to stay and train with Red Walters and a couple of his teammates from X-Speed United (Christoph Janssen and Takis Christopoulos) after he put out an Instagram story asking if anyone wanted to stay in the spare bed he had. It was pretty daunting to say the least not knowing them at all and just hoping I would be able to keep up with them comfortably otherwise I was in for a long week.

However, after meeting all of them and seeing how nice they were I knew it was going to be a great week. The roads were perfect and the climbs were a perfect gradient for training on making the riding effortless. Spending time with these guys taught me so much about nutrition off the bike as well as showing how focussed you have to be to try to make it to the top. It has definitely inspired me to be a better rider. Another highlight of the week was meeting and having dinner with Nils Brun of Tudor pro cycling. It was pretty surreal as he's someone I would just like a picture with so to sit down and have dinner with him and the X-Speed boys was crazy but again where I learned a lot to take home with me. So after a great week and 26 hours of training later I was back home for a week before going off to Tenerife for another week.

The bar was set high so I expected a lot from Tenerife where I stayed in Los Cristantos with one of my mates Jonathan Masters. It was super hot all week and coming from 5 degrees in the UK to 25 was a big shock. On top of that there was a calima which made the air very dusty making the sweetspot and VO2 Max intervals very hard on the lungs. It was insane looking down at the wahoo at the start of the ride and seeing 29 miles of climbing at 5% but it was nice as you didn't have to think about much apart from going up and enjoying the view. The plan was to cram in the hours to make the most of the good weather and then take a week to fully recover and adapt to the very large training load. So after riding to the top of Teide 5 times and climbing the equivalent of over 2 mount Everest's (62000ft) I had done 31 hours in 8 days and felt surprisingly good but sadly had to return back to the cold wet UK for the foreseeable future before starting my road season in March.