With about five days left until the big event, I’m trying to be sanguine about my chances. Deep down I’m thinking “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit – what have I signed up for?”, and those deep down voices are clamouring pretty loudly – making it hard for my optimistic little squeaks to be heard. I think Martin is feeling a little nervous too, although I quite like his mantra “It is what it is – we’ll give it our best shot”. He’s right too – if we don’t have the stamina to complete this now then we’ll never have it. It’s too late to get any meaningful training in now, so we’ll just have to go with what we’ve got already and hope it’s enough. Sarah tells me that Viv (Martin’s wife) is a little nervous too. Sarah hasn’t told me how she’s feeling though!
Sarah is going to be blogging about the event here, with updates on our progress as live as she can make them. Who knows? Perhaps she’ll even upload some photos. As you can see from the Just Giving pages here and here, people have been very generous – lots of money to Parkinsons and the British Heart Foundation. If you haven’t donated already, and if you’d like to, please add your pennies to the hat too. If you have donated then Thank You – but one final thing, please spare a thought for us both as we flog our way south next weekend.
As for training, I haven’t done any long bike rides since the Cotswold sportive a few weeks ago. I have been doing plenty of shorter rides (20, 30, 40 and 50 miles), just to keep my legs used to the idea of cranking round, and trying to up the pace instead. The average time for the long Cotswold Sportive was 6 hours (to complete the 90 mile circuit), and I kept up my Mr. Average pace by completing in 5 hours 55 minutes – that does include about 20 minutes of piddling around at rest stops.