You might have noticed that this is my first post about any sort of progression in my Tour du Mont Blanc training that started over 2 months ago. This is because I haven’t started to really feel or see much till now. There have been micro steps along the way, but only in the last few weeks have I started to lose weight (2.7 kg / 6 lb) and notice some ‘umph’ on the bike.

The main thing I can say is that my butt can handle near 5-hr rides now, and the legs are coming along, too. I’ve been trying to do one or two days a week with some intervals (hill repeats usually) and then a couple of long rides – I’m up to a max 13 hours a week. Like you can glean from my last blog article, I’m also supplementing cycling with yoga (and the occasional Japanese aerobics/core video with my wife).

I’m trying to get some climbing in on every ride, as well, which is not hard out of Nimes but I’ll need to start hopping in the car to get some long hills. I’ve done just under 10,000 meters in 838 km since the beginning of the year – not bad, but I’ll have to be seriously ramping this up because one-day TMB itself has nearly that much climbing!

I’m going to put my humble weight loss down to the extra mileage I did in January, not the fact that I quit drinking. I’m not psychologically ready to admit that beer is not good for training.

I’m also a little afraid of our impending ‘re-confinement’. As you may know from my whinging, in France, lockdown means no riding. This will be a fatal blow to my training at this point in the program, so I’m thinking about changing recovery weeks to recovery ‘few days’. I feel I need to max out my time in the open air.

But today – as you can see from the table above – I’m off the bike. It’s also not January anymore, so I’ve got a shopping trip to the beer fridge planned.