Manual Challenge Day 1

Did the first day of the manual challenge this afternoon as I had the day off yesterday as it was raining all day. This afternoon myself and Dylan my son went to the track to do a bit of training but it was too wet and icy so I decided to do the manual challenge at the track.

My son volunteered to film so it is a bit all over the place so I am editing it now and I will post the video later tonight. I used the back side of the start hill as a run up ramp and then marked a line on the floor to start manualling and my son marked how far the front wheel went. I actually went further than I thought that I would with my furthest 2 attempts being 2 bike lengths.

Once I have edited the video I will be able to analyse my technique better but I know for a fact that my arms were bent and I was not far enough back. I will update the changes that I need to do later.

I am off to Bristol track early in the morning to get some laps in ready for the race on Sunday (my birthday :-) ). Once I finish at the track I will drop my bike off at Crucial to get the gearing sorted ready for Sunday as well. I am going to go for 37x16 as I can not go any higher on the front as the 41 tooth chain ring that I have at the moment is rubbing on the chain stay when I really push hard which is not ideal. I have decided to go with a 16 on the back as I will have more room to go to a higher gearing if needed in the future once I get stronger.

After the track I did 6 x 30 m sprints in the road in front of my house to get my sprints in from yesterday. I then did my exercise circuit as detailed before except that I wasn't able to do the 20 press ups as my collar bone started to hurt and I didn't want to push it too much.

All in all I have had a good day training as I have reached all of my goals today except for eating apples and bananas as we have eaten all of the apples and I forgot that it was a bank holiday so the shops shut early!