>Snow

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Even sub-tropical Harrow has been hit by snow this week. This coincides with week 5 of my ‘training programme’ when I’m supposed to be stepping up the time and effort. I did manage a couple of outdoor hours on Tuesday before the weather set in, but the white stuff mitigated against further outside efforts.

Thursday was the first of a programme of confusing low-intensity power intervals on the turbo which were over rather quickly and involved not quite enough intensity (I’ll know better next week when the duration increases).

I was scheduled to do 3 steady hours on Friday but the roads were too dangerous. I decided to go for a 2 hour session on the turbo instead. A DVD of Mark Cavendish winning the 2009 Milan-San Remo helped distract me some of the time but after an hour and forty five minutes my will and my undercarriage gave out and I quit. It was still my longest ever turbo session (so thanks for that, Cav).

I spent yesterday morning downloading a Sufferfest video, The Hunted. These vids are structured interval sessions with support from groovy music and videos of proper cyclists in races. Unfortunately the DVD wouldn’t run on my ancient lap top, so I ended up spinning away while Cav won Giro, Tour and Tour of Ireland stages for fun. I’ll be able to test The Hunted tomorrow thanks to the free VLC video player which runs on Windows XP. Hurrah (I think)

I have been gathering together a database of races that will run in 2011 from a variety of sources. We still don’t have a moving date, so it’s too early to be making strategic decision on how the season will look. It’ very frustrating. The house move will punch a pretty big hole in the structured training ‘plan’ as well.