The Duo Normand was the best time trial I regularly rode, and as a 2-up tream trial, I always rode with my long-term 2-up partner Gerry (together we styled ourselves Team Grumpy). There are many reasons why I believe this was the best time trial - a large field raning from non-specialist riders through to professional teams; a challenging course of around 54km; and in a great location in the heart of rural Normandy. Gerry and I ended up taking annual holidays in Normandy because of this race.

Sadly the Duo Normand seems to have fallen off the calendar of events, partly due to the Covid pandemic, partly due to local sports politics, but also (I believe) due in part to the political stupidity that is Brexit. 

After all the recent dreary and wet weather, I was pleased to have a lovely spring day to ride over to Beachampton (a bit over 20 miles each way) for this club time trial, though there were many puddles and other mucky sections on the course.

Four riders turned out, including the very youthful Oscar who rode one lap of the course on his mountain bike and accompanied by his dad following close behind (and offering encouragement). The rest of us did two laps on road bikes (the event wasn't open to TT bikes).

In which Team Grumpy make a good impression by turning out in matching kit and bikes - but then disaster strikes! Most years, Team Grumpy rides an early season 2-up team time trial to keep our hand in by brushing up our 2-up skills ahead of the autumn's Duo Normand. Since the apparent demise of the Duo Normand since the 2020 pandemic struck, these early season 2-up events have become an event in themselves, and this year was no exception. After a couple of evenings of food and beer we felt adequately provisioned for a 25 mile time trial. Maybe.

The Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up 25 was held on a course that was about half on dual carriageway, and half on quite seriously undulating back roads. So it's never going to be astoundingly quick, but it's a fun course to ride.

I've posted a few times on my modifications to my set up of the Cervelo P3 (most recently on my home brew eTap wiring). The recent mods over the last few months include:

• Fitting a secondhand pair of Aduro tri-bars with the high arm pad extensions
• A complex rewiring of the 11-speed (i.e. non-AXS) SRAM Red eTap gearing
• Replacing the inner tubes with Tubolito PFU tubes
• Sorting out the computer mount to accept a front light
• Replaced the ageing big chainring.

I've been meaning to take the P3 out for a test ride to make sure all is in order, and with my first event of the 2024 season fast approaching (the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up 25) I decided to do so this morning.

Since the beginning of 2024 I've been increasingly using the Rouvy app in my indoor bike training (see Indoor Training - Part 3 Rouvy vs Zwift and Fulgaz). Until the other day I'd only been using this to enliven my indoor cycling on otherwise very dull interval sessions, but I thought I ought to give Rouvy's workouts a bit of a try. And I'm rather impressed.

The Rouvy website has a very clear description of how this all works. So I needn't offer more than a few comments, based largely on using Rouvy on the AppleTV.

The start of my time trial season is looming ominously on the horizon. In 2024 I plan to ride more open events. Over the last couple of years I've ridden fewer open events (which are usually at weekends) because of various family issues. Mostly those issues have kept me from being able to race at weekends. Our club events are usually mid-week, and therefore have fit better with my lifestyle over the last couple of years.

The first event is an open event, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25' on 10th March. In the past this has always offered an opportunity to brush up my 2-up skills with my regular 2-up partner Gerry - the event is in his neck of the woods. In the following three weekends, I hope to ride the road bike TT series aimed at recruiting beginners to the NBRC club events. This series is on successive Saturday mornings on a 5 mile circuit course.

This was the fifth event in the VTTA's Zwift virtual 10 mile time trial series. Over the first four events, I'd seen a gradual improvement from 24:18 to 23:53. As far as I can tell, the improvement is mostly down to improved consistency in maintaining appropriate power levels, and this event saw my most consistent power so far.

My strategy for this was as follows.

Another Tuesday, another VTTA Zwift time trial.

Aead of this time trial, I decided to splurge some of the 40+ million drops I'd accumulated in Zwift and buy the best frame and wheel combination available. At least as suggested by Zwift Insider. Armed with a (virtually) shiny new (virtual) cadex TT frame with (virtual) DT Swiss wheels, I entered the fourth in the eight event VTTA series.

Recently I'd become interested to see how the power reported by my ageing Tacx Neo smart trainer (first generation) compares with my Assioma pedals (i have the dual set). My initial investigations involved fitting the Assiomas to the bike mounted on the turbo and comparing the reported power by eye. This seemed to have a significant different at least at some power levers, so I felt some further investigations were merited.

In this, my third event in the VTTA 10 mile Zwift TT series, I tried to maintain a steady power. I also tried ride this as I normally do road TTs - that is, at a very low cadence. This worked marginally - I seem to have improved by a piffling 4 seconds! At this rate I may have cracked 24 minutes by the end of the 8 events!

Just before embarking on my warmup, I figured out why I couldn't reach top gear - it was a problem with the placement of the outer gear housing. In retrospect, being able to access the two smallest cogs was not helpful!

I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

If I was a little disappointed at the outcome of my first effort at Zwift time trial racing last week, I did at least pace myself a bit better than I did in event #2. This was held on the same course as event #1, the pan-flat Tempus Fugit course. After a short delay occasioned by an unexpected Zwift update on the Apple TV, I set out to spin through a warm-up ride.

I’ve had a fairly heavy training load over the last week, so maybe I was left a bit jaded. However, the principal failing this evening was a that I didn’t keep a consistent power level through the event. Starting too hard was just the start. I lacked any kind of serious motivation, and repeatedly felt like I just wanted to stop. In fact there’s a surprising number of pauses in the record of the ride (see below).

I've been using Zwift regularly since April 2020, when I was building back from being an 'early adopter' of Covid-19. In all that time, I've not raced in Zwift, and I've only very occasionally ridden with friends on Zwift.

Until now.

Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.

In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).

There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.

In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.

In which I do yet another bout of TT bike fettling, this time to address the front end clutter.

The (possibly mad) plan for the P3C handlebar

Some months ago, I’d bought a secondhand 3T Aduro base bar (the same as came with the P5-Six). The original intention had been to replace the base bar on the P5. Unfortunately the four bolts holding the low extension/armpad mount to the replacement base bar were themselves seized. This appears to be a bit of a problem with these bars - my P5 has a set of Aduro bars in the low position, and one of the four screws holding the stem top plate was seized and I was never able to extract it.

In which I suffer a series of bike crises before even leaving the house, and have a lacklustre performance.

So as usual I started getting set up about an hour before I needed to set out for Astwood. When I came to pump the tyre up on the P5 TT bike, I found that the front wouldn't get up to my desired pressure, then the rear disk wouldn't stay inflated (I think because the valve core came a little loose). So I switched to the P3.

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.

Part 2 - Racing restarts 2021

2021 looked like it’d go the same way as 2020, with massive levels of infection, illness and death following the foolish decision by our pathetic and incompetent Government to grandstand over "not cancelling Christmas".  However, things did settle a bit, and by mid-April we felt able to start running our 2021 series of club time trials.

We planned how to do this in a Covid-safe way, taking the following measures: