2022 has been a year fraught with challenges for me. Starting off with Covid in March, looking after elderly parents, regularly travelling back and forth 200 miles away to where they live and finally having shoulder surgery in mid-June which put me out of action for around 2 months. All of these impacted my ability to train and maintain a good level of fitness.
My husband had to run for me in the half marathon I’d entered to run in July as I was unable to do it due to the surgery. So, when the opportunity to join the Voxwomen project arose I jumped at the opportunity to help kick start my training with a view to representing women of my age (50+) who it seems are under-represented in the cycling world. After having never really used nutritional tools before it will be interesting to see how I improve using them. Previously I would happily go for a 2-3 hour ride and never bother with any nutrition and drink only water. So equipped with my new tools I am starting to experiment.
During the pandemic I regularly raced and TT’d on Zwift, this year I’ve hardly managed a ride a month. So, I decided I better reset my baseline by doing a TT on Zwift, yuk and ouch. Yuk as I felt sick and ouch as I could see my FTP had dropped significantly, not too surprising though. So, lots of work to do. Since October I have been joining the Donny Chain Gang on Zwift weekly to add to my training, my current aim is not to get dropped, I think it might take me the winter months to achieve this but it’s a good objective.
I’ve been tracking my glucose levels, both during activity and at recovery using the Supersapiens sensor and app. I’ve noticed that my running and swimming glucose scores (effective glucose usage during exercise) are good and consistent however my cycling ones vary depending on what type of training I do. I’ve now put the data field on my Garmin watch and intend to monitor when levels begin to drop so that I can think about effective feeding strategies for longer or harder rides testing the Precision Fuel & Hydration products to see which works best for me.
I had set a goal of getting back to fitness, back to a racing weight and to enter a challenge. Back to fitness means getting my FTP back to where I was or higher. Racing weight means dropping 3 kilos, quite a challenge over the winter months. My challenge will be the Majorca 312 as I have previously ridden the Etape du Tour. Well, I managed to register, I am currently on a waiting list so let’s hope I get a ride.
I’m really looking forward to January 2023 when I go to Lanzarote for some early warm weather training using my new tools to help me along the way.
Thanks for reading my blog this month; look forward to providing you with further updates soon.
Claire
