On a cool and windy morning the Team met in a Co-oP car park after travelling down from Leeds and up from Bristol, got changed, prepared the bikes and ourselves for the Shrewsbury 3 peaks training session. The ride started with a ten minute road section before the inevitable upwards climb that wasn't too steep to start off with which was easily ride-able. A bit disconcerting though as we were passed by a mountain bike tandem! That was impressive but I don’t think my wife would entertain the idea! However the easily ride-able section soon materialised into an awesome muddy downhill section.
The only issue with this awesome muddy downhill was that we were going up and not down which wasn't encouraging as bike after bike went past us blasting down the trail and commenting on how mad we must be to go up and not down. What they didn't realise was that our trail didn't just involve the one fell which they were riding, but three!
During the whole route we were also tracked in realtime with the new Minorplanet 6000 which can be seen with a snapshot of the detailed report.
Please sponsor us by clicking on the JustGiving link on the left hand side
Once at the top it was clear that the howling wind was becoming a real issue and it was going to be against us for most of the day, wind blowing into your face makes cycling up hills and dales quite a difficult task, but the top did bring some quite rewarding sites.
It was easy to see why the area is very popular with walkers and cyclist with some quite steep but very picturesque heather covered fells. Anyway back to the training; the route which Marc had picked was without doubt the best route we have trained on yet. It was challenging in the vertical sense, it was challenging in the technical sense of having to negotiate goat tracks on the side of steep hills, extreme uphill sections and of course some quite extreme downhill sections that saw average speeds over the minute in excess of 30mph.
And 30mph isn't bad across fields when being challenged by kamikaze sheep, eh Adam??! All in all a very physically challenging but enjoyable day where we covered 30 miles of terrain that was as near as possible to what we are expecting on the challenge week. More of the same please Marc!
Please sponsor us by clicking on the JustGiving link on the left hand side
No comments:
Post a Comment