My Rapha Festive 500

After not riding much in October, November and early December I thought I’d use the Rapha Festive 500 as a kick-start to my training and to get my cycling mojo back.

Ride one (24th Dec)
60.8 km
Was an OK start, wet out! (Strava link)

Ride two (26th Dec)
49.8 km
Managed to get out on Boxing Day for a change (Strava link)

Ride three (27th Dec)
71.6 km
Started to get some slightly better k’s in, still wet out there!
Got my 1/3 complete badge (Strava link)

Ride four (28th Dec)
21.7 km
Felt very tired and needed an easy hour to recover. Going from doing almost no riding to four rides in 5 days was starting to have an effect. (Strava link)

Ride five (29th Dec)
103.7 km
Felt so much better after an ‘easy’ day and did what I wanted to do during the Festive 500, a 100k+ ride. The weather continued to be awful, rain and very strong winds. Pleased with the distance in the conditions as I’m not one for riding in the rain! (Strava link)

Ride six (30th Dec)
51.5 km
Yet another wet ride and another 50k+ to my total. Starting to feel it now though.
I had done 359.1 km in total now and had 140.9 km to do on the final day. I knew this wasn’t going to happen, it would have to be my longest ride of the week and I was feeling very tired, the weather not playing ball wasn’t helping either!
Got my 2/3 complete badge (Strava link)

Ride seven (31st Dec)
48.3 km
I set out thinking that I would aim for a 450km total so that was a 91km ride. The rain and wind was the worst it had been for the whole week so my aim quickly dropped to 400+km. I’d had enough! (Strava link)

I finished on 407km (81%) in the end, tired but happy, I’d done 19 hours of riding over the festive period which is my biggest ever week. (and in the rain, not like me!)

Very well done to anyone in the UK who managed the 500km #hat Some scary totals below! I was 574th out of 1,997 riders in the UK

A big thanks to @cyclingdrummer and Dave Cole of TVS for keeping me company on some of the rides.

I’ll be back in December 2013