The Road to Ventoux - Part 27

Day 3: The day before….

The Ventoux3 challenge is raising money for the Out of the Blues charity at https://www.justgiving.com/campaign/outoftheblues.

Met up with Nicol and Viv, who are doing the first climb with me, last night for a meal. Great to catch up and talk about the challenge. Arranged to meet up for lunch today.

Horrendous night’s sleep. Awake for around 2 hours in the middle of the night thinking of what needed doing before the challenge. Tried everything to get off to sleep, and eventually did. Finally woke at about 7:45 feeling pretty tired. For the last 6 months or more I have been using a “WHOOP” strap that senses my heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate, temperature and activity. Over the months it gradually learns what my optimum physiological parameters are. It then shows the amount of “strain” I have undertaken each day (physical and psychological), the amount and quality of my sleep, and my “recovery” – indicating how ready I am for strenuous physical activity. This is coded green, amber or red with a percentage score. The day after a tough training session, my recovery usually dips into amber, and after a rest day it tends to go into the green, though this is impacted by how good my sleep is. Over the last 7-10, while I have been tapering my training, my recovery score has pretty much consistently been in the green. However, after the very early start prior to the flight out to France, I was deep in the red yesterday scoring just 12%. I was hoping to bounce back into the green today, but my score is just 20% and still in the red. I need to focus on resting today and to try to get an early night prior to an early start tomorrow.

Despite a recovery score in the red, as planned I did a short ride to loosen me up this morning. I headed off up the start of the climb from Bedoin. After a short warm up, I did 3 mins of tempo level effort plus 2 mins of easy peddling repeated four times, before turning round and heading back down into Bedoin. Felt pretty good despite being knackered! I know there is nothing too terrifying at the start of the first climb tomorrow morning.

After the ride I have charged up my lights, gears and Garmin bike computer, sorted out my fuel, kit and tools to go in the support car tomorrow. After lunch focusing on carbohydrate loading, we head off to Avignon to pick up Ailidh and Adam from the train station. Tonight we hope to catch up with Sasha and Richard to finalise details for tomorrow…..

Further information about the challenge, and my blogs about my training, can be found at http://outoftheblues.org/news/cat/the-road-to-ventoux.

Hamish McAllister-Williams