Turning the screw, a weeks training in France.

So I have now been back in the Beautiful Beaulieu-Sur-Mer for near on a week! Seems like I left the cooler and wet UK ages ago! Today is my first rest day here, they always seem worse as the weather outside is near on 30 degrees and is shouting at you to get up and get out on the bike. You must allow the body to adapt to the training and get the feet up!

I have the Marmotte with its altered route this year coming in less than 2 weeks now. So this coming 6 days and the last 6 are important to train hard, I did my first ride last Wednesday and as usual did my Madone time trial effort. Each time I do this I feel I should have waited a day or so till I get used to the heat and get the flight/travel out of my body but I am too keen to get in done! Slightly annoyingly, my data was not read properly on Strava, but with my timing I believe I was only 20 seconds off my PB. So overall not an awful effort but not faster which is what it is all about ultimately!

After the ride I thought about it and I had not felt amazing in my legs and first ride after travelling (I hear you all shouting “excuses excuses”..), but I am now in theory only a few weeks behind where I was last year after start training 3 month later and this continued injury to look after. So there were positives in going slower. I will not bore you with the thoughts that conditions/wind/etc etc were to blame for a few seconds here and there as well!! ;-)

After the Madone effort I rolled out a couple of hours recovery in the pm. Then followed up the next day with 3+ hrs of 10min on 10 min off, 280 watts and 200 watts. These were not always strict but a rough guide with traffic, junctions, descents all to contend with. I completed the session with around 95 mins of 280 watts so was happy with that. Some dark times but got the miles in the bag. Day after started with a couple of hrs of easy spinning with the idea of doing 2 timed runs up Col d”Eze in the afternoon. One with a TT style set up and the other with a standard road bike set up.

Some interesting result, you can all look below for yourselves on the numbers on strava but in general in the TT position it was hard to keep fully on track of the power as I was trying to hold the aero position. Though I do think I was consistently very close to 300 watts all the way on both. In general I did make up some time with the aero set up on the middle 3% section, but the bigger gains were found on the top flat/down hill bit. Over 1500m I gained 10 seconds I believe and that was with easing off round a corner, so faster with less power. In the end it was all good training (and a huge sweat fest in the TT helmet!!).

https://www.strava.com/activities/328693219

I then decided I would do a long but easy ride on the Saturday morning, I headed out to San Remo and to roll up the famous Poggio climb as an excuse to go there. In addition to this I wanted to look for the new cycle path they have, this was a nice bonus comparing it to the rough roads we usually find on the Italian side of the border.

Me proving I got up the Poggio climb.

Sunday both me and Justin travelled up to Valberg where they had their second running of the sportive there. I will be writing a Blog up about this very soon as it was UBER impressed with it all. As you can expect I rode it as hard as I could and tried to stay with the leaders for as long as I could, there is a young french guy called David Polveroni who I heard about a couple of years ago from the Haute Route events and he was there. It was good to see how close I could get to him as 2 years ago he was way above my ability.

A sample of the stunning rock colour in the area of Valberg.

Back in Beaulieu, I wanted to have a little spin out on the Monday to try to clear the legs a bit. I rode up to a pretty village called “Peille” where the Boulangerie there sells shots of coffee incredibly cheap. So that was going to be my route, I arrived there and to my dismay I found the sign “FERME” on the door.... they were closed from 13:00-15:00, it was around 13:45 so no way I was going to wait it out. I then spun my way back to the coast tail between my legs a little embarrassed I had forgot about French lunch “hours”...!

So we are back to today and resting....! You can never under estimate a rest day especially with achey knees. I hope to get the Valberg write up done as soon as possible as it is probably the best cycling event I have ever done.

Thanks again for reading.