The Road to Ventoux - Part 28

D-Day: Getting to the start….

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

Yesterday, after driving to Avignon and back to pick up Adam and Ailidh, decided that the best thing to do was to stay in and have an early night. Ailidh cooked up a fantastic pasta dish with pesto, courgettes, chicken and sun-dried tomatoes. All of us were knackered and so off to bed well before 9. It took a while to get off to sleep, but I slept really well thank goodness.

Woke up before the alarm at 4:45am. Got up and started prepping. Had some granola, yoghurt and honey, a banana and a cup of tea. Packed car with spare clothes, food, water, pump, spare tyres and various tools etc. By this time, the rest of the family were up. Gave my bike the once over and filled my pockets with gels and my top tube bag with jelly babies. We all then set off to meet Nicol, Viv and Mary at the start of the first climb out of Bedoin. A few pictures taken and we were ready for the off, with a plan that I would ride with Mary and Nicol and Viv would make their own way up.

How did I feel? I guess both excited and apprehensive. I really did not know how I was going to feel slogging up the steeper sections for km after km. I was worried about my lack of sleep and my WHOOP recovery rating s being in the red. I did not look at my WHOOP score before staring off since I did not want a poor score to worry me. As I later found out, I need not have worried – my score had climbed from 20% the previous day to 92%. This, I think was due to taking it a bit easier with a little less rushing around, eating an evening meal early and getting a good night’s sleep, even if not as long as it would ideally have been.

Anyway, at 6:30am Mary and I set off, shortly overtaken by the “support car” with Alison, Ailidh and Adam…….

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