It's Christmas!

Today is officially day 1 of my personal highlight of the training plan - Christmas break! I've still been out for a ride, but it really was a 'just for fun' mixed in with trying to get up my confidence on my new bike. If I'm being honest I am slightly concerned about that at the moment. I've not worked out how to move my hands off the bars to indicate properly yet, never mind grabbing a water bottle on the move. I'm hoping it is just a case of practice, practice, practice. One of the other club members has very kindly passed on an old indoor trainer so just as soon as I figure out how to set up my bike I'll be using that to practice the technical aspects whilst stationary and hopefully will then be able to transfer that to outdoor riding. 

After Christmas we only have about 20 weeks left till the big ride, so fundraising will need to start properly, though I don't know if January is the best time for that. Still, getting some sponsorship in should be good motivation as we hit some of the harder bits of training just when we could be heading in to the worst weather.  I know most of us are training indoors at the moment but it would be good to get at least some outdoor rides in, and we do definitely need to practice group riding.  Ian has given us some very precise instructions for our group ride on 12th January so we'll see how we get on with them! 
We've also been given lots of advice on nutrition and hydration which is going to be really important as training steps up, though the advice for this week is definitely eat, drink and be merry 😃

The next stage of training is 'build muscular endurance' so in 8 weeks time I'll hopefully be the fittest I've ever been (which admittedly isn't saying much...) so that will probably be my next update.

Merry Christmas and keep cycling!