34/27 Marks Cycling Blog: NCC club run

Sunday 7 November 2010

NCC club run - sort of

The boys and girls of the North Cheshire Clarion are off on a hilly run today, off to ride/slide Swiss Hill and then onto the Cat & Fiddle but there are a handful of us that want to take it easy because some of us want to follow a plan, a training plan. In my case it's the Joe Friel plan as worked out from his excellent training book. last year I decided to follow Chris Carmichaels 'The Time crunched Cyclist' which is an excellent book if you want a ready made plan but with Friels book he offers you a much more personalised plan according to your weaknesses, goals and hour allowance plus he outlines a full years worth of training as opposed to the few weeks of Carmichaels plan, in fairness though you can reuse Carmichaels plan during the year but there's not much in the way of personalisation.

Anyway, as I said some of us want flat to keep the heart rate down so myself and Matt decided to meet up an hour later than normal at Stretton for a flat 30 miler (plus the miles to get there and back), we were however joined by three others who for various reasons were unable to ride on the big boys ride so the five of us made our way out towards Appleton and then south into a maze of little country lanes with what felt like more horses on the road than cars. Plenty of other cyclists out today all enjoying themselves in the autumn sun and even though we were riding fairly slow we still managed to pass a few including a lady group and in the opposite direction another club also riding fairly slow - must have been getting their 'endurance miles' in just like us. No cafe stop just steady miles and no hills to speak of but there was a few rises along the way that got the heart rate out of the desired range on occasion; I suppose that's to be expected and there's not much you can do about that other than retreating to the turbo but on a cool day like this with plenty of sun and no wind the road wins hands down - plenty of turbo time ahead once the winter really bites.

A nice short run on a very nice cool sunny autumn day and I can see there being quite a few more of these unofficial NCC rides when the club does a 'hilly' as some of us need to ride endurance/base miles over the next few months.