Three Weeks left til NPS2

This week has not been too productive training-wise unfortunately. This has been mainly due to the problems I have been experiencing with my lower back and the fact that I am still in full-time work. Fair play to guys who can do a full days manual labour and still have the energy for training when they come home!

Got on the turbo trainer for an hour and a bit on Wednesday. These weeks are all about improving my lactate threshold. If I understand it right, this will allow me to go longer at hard pace (which equtes to about 165bpm in my case). This is definitely something I will need for NPS2 in Ballinastoe on April 19th. From what I have read from last years race, the course is based mainly on the Coillte built trails. This means plenty of 5min fire road climbs followed by a few minutes of singletrack descending and repeat. This could suit me better to last weeks race as you can really push it on the descents.

Today I took the road bike out for a spin. Headed from Castleknock-Porterstown-Maynooth-Naas-Newcastle-Rathcoole-Tallaght-Crumlin-Phoenix Park and home. Speedo clocked it at 88km. I actually quite enjoyed the spin. Would be a lot more enjoyable with someone I'm sure but still not so bad! Can definitely see how doing plenty of those pre season would get you well set up for racing mtb.

My five friends and I have started seriously thinking about what to do for summer this week. This is the main reason I have been working my two weeks off. I think the plan is going to be- fly from Dublin to San Francisso. From here, we're going to check out west coast USA for a few days before renting a car and taking a few days to road trip up to Vancouver. Here we plan to get a couple of weeks of biking in Whistler in before travelling around Canada a bit. Fairly loose plans at the moment but I reckon we'll be gone for a month- six weeks. Maybe longer if we can afford it! We've decided not to buy a working visa as they cost 650euro. The way I see it, by the time we found a job (pretty unlikely) and worked for the month, we probably wouldn't even make the 650euro back again!

That's all for now. My plan was to race the Des Hanlon memorial road race tomorrow but after today, I don't fancy the drive to Carlow to get hammered by roadies and wind. Think I'm gonna dust off Jim (my freeride bike) and do the classic Balliastoe to Djouce over the boardwalks. Sounds like a good crowd is out for it so should be a lotta fun!