New Fastest Speed 44.2mph

 

Had a staggered training ride on Saturday as Joy mentioned that, weather dependant, she would like to come out on the bike for a 20 mile distance, Stacey had an athletics event in the afternoon so didn’t want to ride more than 40 miles and I wanted to do another 60 to keep the momentum going.

Stacey rode over to us in the morning and the three of us did a 23 mile loop down to Green Cross.  It’s the first time Joy has joined me on a proper training ride but she did magnificently, keeping up a great pace around 18mph on the flat which averaged out to 15.6mph over the distance.  This was especially good considering how it started to drizzle as we left home and didn’t stop for the duration of this section of the ride.

After Stacey and I had returned Joy back home we headed out on a rough idea of a route back to his place via the other side of Farnham indenting to do another 15 miles together.  This was quite a lot of unknown roads to me and going along Compton Way was awesome as its lots of small ups and downs so plenty of short sprints rewarded with a nice downhill after.  We missed a turning on the way back and got a little lost but when we got to Beacon Hill Road I remembered how this is where I had set my previous fastest speed (44.0mph) a few weeks back and decided to have another shot at topping this.  All tucked in and down on the drops I kept on pedalling hard and changing down through the gears until I reached ninth but had a slight problem with tenth not wanting to engage for about 5 seconds so was not perfect but I still managed to hit 44.2mph so happy with that.

After leaving Stacey at his place I headed back on an idea of a route I had in my head to tag another 20 miles on to the 42 ridden so far.  It had been on and off drizzle so far but then around the 45 mile mark it absolutely chucked it down with rain falling from the sky like a river so thick that I could not see further than a couple of metres.  This continued for the next 5 to 10 miles and was particularly demoralising when combined with riding on my own.  I got home having completed 63 miles in total and managing 15.3mph average over the distance.  The average speed is a bit down from what I wanted to achieve but looking at the splits of the ride I can see its where we where going slow due to being lost and then having to slow down when I couldn’t see where I was going.
When I got home both the bike and I looked more like we had been mountain biking through the woods so after a shower and a huge plate of delicious Jerk Chicken with Rice and Pea which Joy had cooked for us I spent 3 hours cleaning both our bikes and re oiling all the moving parts.  I got on with this because I did plan to do a 40 mile ride to Uxbridge on the Sunday but it was chucking it down again the next morning and I wimped out blaming not wanting to get my nice clean bike dirty!!!