So as we move from Miserable March into Awful April my Egg remains intact! I have decided to continue the alcohol and chocolate abstinence!
My training starts well, continuing with the training loops of the common. Spring is here and all seems lovely.
But then the temperatures drop. Significantly! The sound of ice being scraped off cars can be heard every morning. Early morning training rides are abandoned.
Fortunately other rides continue and the month begins with a beautiful Breeze Ride to Dunstable downs.
Breeze seems to dominate the month of April with more route planning for the future rides and even taking part in Breeze leader training and a first aid course. I may be leading my own rides soon!
Fortunately there was time for one Sportive this month. A 60mile loop from Milton Keynes.
Stuart and I do this ride with Catherine who has been a bit incapacitated with a dodgy knee.
She still has an amazing ride and I am pulled along by sticking to her wheel.
At the end of the ride, we meet up with more Breeze ladies, Jo, Deborah and Lesley.
Maybe this is an odd picture to share of the group, but I love this shot as it was taken at the end of the day, when everyone is relaxed and sharing a cuppa and feeling good at the satisfaction of completing a long ride!
A new cafe stop is discovered by the Breeze ladies at Frithsden. The morning that Helen, Laura (my fellow Breeze training champion) and I visit Frithsden, there are two other groups of Breeze ladies visiting on the same day.
It is the siren song of the freshly baked blueberry scone that means this will be a favourite haunt of the ladies!
I manage to do a couple of VCC rides this month, but my performance is less than stellar.
Feeling the need to improve my performance I visit a very high tech Bike Fit place. After 3 hours of measuring every possible angle of me on the bike, adjustments are made.
My first ride after the fit and I'm in agony. Although everything below the waist is probably at optimal performance, my neck is in agony after the ride. So bad I need painkillers. Stuart returns my bike to its original positions. I'm very disappointed.
I know that I have a right hip issue that means I will never be a speedy cyclist, but after visits to a surgeon, a radiologist, a physiotherapist and now a bike fit specialist, I realise that the only person who can get me through this is me and I just have to get on with it and work with the fact that I have a dodgy hip.
3 months to go until Ride 100, it's time to get serious.
