Part of this years sabbatical time off (as it was in the first sabbatical in 2017) I had a little trip to Tenerife on the bike.
This one was slightly different as this time I travelled to Tenerife with Louis (an 18 year old, virtually professional long distance triathlete who is also my daughters boyfriend).
We planned the trip from ages out in an autumn period where the pandemic seemed to be disappearing only to be faced with the variant weeks before we were going and the uncertainty of travelling at all.
When the day came on the 9th of January (3 days after my birthday) we were able to get and go and on we went.
This was an 18 year old with extraordinary levels of fitness and bike ability vs a 50 year old with almost no fitness and no bike ability and plenty of old war wounds to nurse through a punishing week of cycling up hills.
So, why do you bother to go away for a week with your bike?
It’s a hassle, packing everything, making sure you have all your equipment, making sure you can travel with your bike, making sure that you have an accommodation which is suitable and making sure you have routes to ride and everything that you need. Not to mention all the logistics that go with the current pandemic are a complete stress.
You find yourself the day before stressing out wondering if you have everything and wondering why you are bothering and that always seems to be the case.
It’s worthwhile remembering as you look back with rose tinted glasses on these trips that it takes a lot to get there and quite a lot to get home too.
Having said that we left at 9am on Sunday 9th January on a plane from East Midlands bound for Tenerife and everything else was pretty seamless.
The plan for me was just to ride my bike as much as was reasonable and feasible.
The plan for Louis was to bike, run and swim much more than me.
Louis is there for a month on a self designed, self financed and planned training camp in Tenerife to catapult him into the new season towards the European championships.
I was there to try to get 5 days of cycling.
The thing I learnt long ago about ‘training camps’ is you’re not really supposed to be fit before you hit the training camp.
You get fit on the training camp and you find out how unfit you are on the training camp and certainly the second of these was very much true on this occasion.
The last time I was here with my coach, Simon and we stayed half way up the hill and even getting to the top of the hill from that halfway point was absolutely terrible.
This time we stayed on the shore and so shore to summit in any direction is something like 25 miles and 2,100 metres (getting towards 8,000 feet) of climbing.
I had resolved to try to climb the mountain (Mount Teide) on 2 occasions through the 5 days of riding and we managed it on Wednesday and Friday.
I always learn a lot about myself on these types of trips, not least do I still want to ride a bike and do I still want to ride a bike at any sort of level more than riding for an hour a day.
I learn about my organisational skills and I learn about how best to spend my time off the bike when I have a selfish and uninterrupted amount of time to be inside my own head and do my own thing.
The trip was amazing.
Much, much better than the last time I came to Tenerife.
We found this bike specific cafe half way up the hill on the west side of Tenerife in a little village called Chio which has a wall lettered with cycle jerseys and photographs signed by professional cyclists who have stopped there.
We climbed the mountain on Wednesday and the mountain by the south route (even harder) on Friday and this was interspersed by great rides and great memories and great stops.
We even found a TEAM INEOS test climb called ‘bananas’ where you cycle the climb with a whole forest of banana trees on the left hand side.
By the end of the week the wind had gotten up and I couldn’t ride on the Saturday but the truth is after the brutal Wednesday and Friday rides of over 5 hours to get to the top of the mountain, I was probably not in the best shape.
I’m learning that being over 50 the recovery after sessions is probably at least as important, if not more so than the sessions themselves and to be able to recover and rest after you’ve abused yourself on a bike for that length of time is an essential part of the planning overall.
Most importantly though, I learned that I’m in bad shape.
I learned that the past 2 years or more have wrecked me psychologically but also allowed me to drift physically into a state that I find unacceptable.
That really is what this trip was for.
Not to find out how fit I was but to find out how fit I wasn’t.
To stare myself in the face just a little bit short of the summit of Mount Teide on Friday 14th January and see whether I liked the person that was looking back.
I knew it was time for me to make a change, it just took a stretch of tarmac up the south side of a volcano to show me where and how much change was required.
Blog Post Number - 2970
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