Cycling Through The Pandemic

Part 1 - 2020

So it will come as no surprise that 2020 was the weirdest cycling year since I came back to the sport in 1990.

I started in reasonably good form, considering the drop in motivation I had experienced through the autumn of 2019 and into winter. I’d continued a lot of travelling, with monthly trips to Edinburgh - though in training terms these weren’t too disruptive since I’m able to set up a turbo trainer there. I did an OK effort at the New Year’s Day ’10’, and settled down to try and ramp up the training for the opening event of my 2020 season proper, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up ’25’ in March.

But.

By mid-January, I’d developed a really nasty cold that flattened me for five days and a much longer recovery period. By then I was wondering whether I should consider taking a racing break for the first time. Still, we visited Wales for what was to be Team Grumpy’s first outing of 2020 at the PTW 2-up. Unfortunately the weather on the morning of the 2-up was absolutely shocking and had left quantities of standing water on the course, so we declined to start.

Back home, we were looking to the start of the club’s time trial league on 21st March. By then, with the pandemic raging in Italy and Spain and clearly making major inroads in the UK, it was clear that sporting events were going to be cancelled, so the club committee made the decision to pull the first TT League event. Also, at around that time, the CTT abandoned time trialling until the end of May (later extended to the end of June… and in the end timetrialling only began again from around the end of July).

By 20th of March, we’d been told to work from home. Then I started feeling a bit unwell (with usual cold symptoms) on the 21st. A day or so later I felt really awful, and over the following week had the most impressive array of cold and flu type symptoms. I presume this was Covid-19 as I had all symptoms other than severe breathing difficulties (I did have moderate respiratory difficulty). At that time, there wasn't an easily accessible test available to me.

In the longer term, I wasn’t severely affected by (presumed) Covid-19 - it seems as though major breathing difficulties are the marker for severe as opposed to mild cases. For me, the breathing issues were limited to feeling out of breath and gasping a bit when walking up the stairs at home.

At any rate I felt well enough to venture out on the road bike in mid April, though I crept round a rather short route and felt weak as a kitten. An attempt a week or so later to do a ramp test ended in ignominy and a paltry estimated FTP of 171W. This did not look good. At around this time, I investigated some of the software platforms available for use with my Smart trainer. I plumped for the biggest and most popular one, Zwift. This choice really enabled a turnaround in my fitness as I came back from illness.

Zwift

I’d had a smart trainer for a few years - an original model Tacx Neo - and had been using it with TrainerRoad on a desultory and disorganised way. I had long been sceptical of Zwift, as it looked terribly 'gamified'. In practice, however, I found the platform really quite engaging, and placed this as a regular element of my daily and weekly routine of cycle training. Initially, I was using it as means to gradually come back from Covid-19. In fact, I rapidly set into a routine of a morning and an evening turbo session bookending my working day. This has suited me well, and while most of my friends were bemoaning the weight gain associated with working from home, I saw my weight drop off considerably.

The Duo Normand

The Duo Normand is usually one of the highlights of the cycling season for me and for Team Grumpy. Fairly early on in the pandemic, we saw a posting in a TT forum saying that the event had been cancelled for 2020. While there were few announcements from the organisers themselves, it was clearly abandoned for 2020.

As I returned to training in early April after illness, I set up a TrainerRoad programme with a mixture of indoor and road-based sessions, aiming at developing and maintaining strong form for the Duo Normand. I stuck with this despite the cancellation of the Duo Normand and the almost complete lack of racing through 2020.

’25’ on the F1B/25