The Training, Prep and fitness levels

 So last year after the Camino its fair to say I was broken.  My feet were screwed, knee’s and my back was really not in a good way so spent the remainder of 2013 trying to fix myself.  Obviously this meant doing very little excercise and eating lots of crap.  The weather here in Aberdeen is generally always crap in Winter so when I had the plan to come back to the Camino in February but didn’t really get back into cycling for fun until March.

So before I started my training for walking the Camino last year I was very much into Road Cycling pretty big distances 140 miles in one day and a few charity long cycles 160 miles over 2 days and pretty regularly cycling plus 40 miles however a lot of this fitness was lost due to pretty much minimally cycling last year in preperation for the Camino.  The focus was on walking although I did commute to work on my bike but it was pretty short distances.

So this year when the weather cleared I cycled the same routes I walked last year and my kind of default peddle is a power hour 15 mile flat cycle which although at first was a stubble I was soon smashing that out with very little issues.  The started building up for longer bike rides but wanted to keep it reasonable.  So in the longer rides a 40 mile loop would be fairly normal on the weekends then started some back to back days like cycling up to Fraserburgh staying the night and cycling back the next day at around 45 miles each way and also went up the top of my nearest mountain which is where all the TV masts are so you know its a good size.  My biggest recent milage in one go was 64 miles about 2 weeks ago.

So my Dad’s path was very different as he really doesn’t cycle as much as me and most his bikes have engines so this was more of a task for him to get into.  So he started cycling to work and going for rides nothing crazy but 10 -15 miles no stopping and getting on ok tho he has to keep and eye on his knee as he has had issues with this in the past.

So are we ready I think were all good, don’t get me wrong you can always do more and be better but we aren’t in any rush and even if we cycled 50 miles a day with an average of 10 mph thats only 5 hours of riding with spaces, breaks, coffee’s and rests between there and there so I think were in a very good place but of course part of the adventure is not knowing what can happen.

Il stop boring you now and show some pics of a few of my training adventures:

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