Seven consecutive days of fun in the saddle riding in the basement on the trainer in support of the Davis Phinny Foundation for Parkinson’s. Well, perhaps fun isn’t the right term as there was some suffering involved towards the end of the tour 🤣.
I’ve ridden The Tour for several years in a row now and this year is was a day shorter but I took an more intense option. You see the “rides” are workouts that are scaled to your current fitness level and there are options as to how hard you want to ride. There is the “get me through it” option where things are scaled back so hopefully you can get through the seven days even if you’re not used to riding this much on back to back days. Then there is the “nuclear” option. All rides are at 100%, there is no scaling back, its full on every day. And then there is the “focused” option, a middle ground where the rides are scaled back a bit but not too much.This year I was “focused”. Perhaps next year “nuclear”?
The day to day riding went pretty well. The longer 2+ hour rides on the weekends were challenging not only due to fatigue and effort but how much my derrière can endure in the saddle on the trainer. So much easier to do long rides outside where there is more bike movement. To make the final days ride a bit easier I took advantage of the 50 hour window to move one of the 30 minute rides to the Friday so that Saturday was only a bit over two hours, plenty long enough for the end of a week of riding.
