Had a really good coaching session again today. We focused a lot on gates and on riding with not a lot of space which was good.
I was gating really well on the Meybo and I was manualing and pumping much better on it than the Speedco so I am thinking that I will stick to riding the Meybo for now. I concentrated a lot on attacking jumps today instead of hitting them and reacting afterwards which worked really well and I was getting faster as the straight went on instead of getting slower.
I will keep trying to focus on this for the time being to try and keep building speed as I ride the track.
I have Monday afternoon off so I will go to the track and work on building and carrying speed around the track as this is an area I have been struggling with recently.
My legs still got really rubbery after a while and I was unable to ride at full speed for the whole session or participate in all of the drills which was expected but still disappointing!
I am going to go to the gym tomorrow to pick up my key fob so that I can start working out Monday morning early to start and build my base fitness so that my legs stop giving up before I am ready to! I am also really keen to start skipping as soon as possible as it will help with my leg strength/ fitness, help improve foot speed and also kick start my weight loss as I really need to start shifting weight as soon as possible to get to a decent weight by the start of the season! I also really want to get better at skipping so that I can start to use it as a warm-up before riding to start and build a warmup routine that I can use whenever I exercise to let my body know that it is time to perform.
Last night I also removed all of the spokes from my Onyx hub and cleaned it up ready to take it to Crucial to get it laced up to a new rim so that I can put it back on the Meybo to see how it will ride with the Onyx hub rather than the Profile Elite hub. The Profile Elite’s are really good hubs but I just feel like the Onyx is a bit better out of the gate and out of berms. That being said the Profile’s feel amazing once pedalling and they sound amazing 🙂
I am now 90% certain that I will convert the Meybo to disk brake when I can afford it and I have found a universal disk brake adapter from Pride that will work with the Meybo dropouts so once I get some money on my Credit card I will buy it and test the bike out with a disk brake and the Staystrong Wheels. It is going to cost me £100 the adapter and a 140mm disk which is not too expensive really. I will use the brake off of my 4x frame for now and will try and get a mechanical brake to use at some point.
I have been thinking about what to do with the Profile elite hubs once I am using the Staystrong ones and I think that I will put them back on my 24″ Sunday Wave C frame and forks and build that up to use to ride to the gym in the mornings and practice flat manuals etc on as it is sat around doing nothing at the moment so I may as well put it to work! I can also use it to ride to work once we go back to the office again! Building the Sunday back up makes more sense than the 20″ as it is the same size as my race bike so the skills learnt on it will be more transferable than the 20″ would be. I am also way less bothered about it getting stolen than any of my race bikes so I will be less stressed leaving it locked up outside of the gym or work than I would be one of the race bikes. I also want to get used to riding it again to try and get into riding the skatepark in the summer when it is dryer so riding it as my riding about bike makes sense for that too.
Tomorrow I am going to swap the forks over from the Speedco onto the Meybo and then the forks from the Meybo onto my son’s dialled so that I can use the Dialled on the rollers during the week as the current forks it has on it are 20mm dropouts with 10mm adapters which will not work on the rollers as they have a quick release mechanism on them. I want to start doing an interval session on Thursday Nights to try and get some kind of fitness before the start of the season. I am going to start off with a 15 minute session where 3 minutes is a warm up then I go into sprinting for 10 seconds followed by 50 seconds and then sprinting for another 10 seconds until I have done 10 minutes or 10 sprints. I will then cool down for the last 2 minutes. I think that I should be able to cope with a 10 second all out sprint as it is just a bit longer than the 50m sprints that we do on a Tuesday night which take me under 7 seconds to complete so 10 seconds will equate to about 75m more or less so our 50m sprints will start to seem easy after a few interval sessions. This will also hopefully start to get my leg fitness back and work on my recovery as at the moment my recovery from all out efforts is really poor! Also as my son;s bike has the same gearing as my race bike the interval sessions will be way more race specific than when I was trying them on the road bike.
Starting the gym and adding intervals on a Thursday night should mean that by the next Bristol race I should be able to at least do more than one full speed lap without losing the ability to walk or put out maximal effort in the later races.
I also need to start practicing flat manuals as I have actually regressed from last month instead of improving so I need to get that sorted ASAP. Until I get the Sunday built up I will use my Son’s Dialled as my ride around bike and manual practice bike as it has flat pedals on it so I don’t have to change them before I use the bike. I think that the best time to practice manuals at the moment is when I am riding to and from the gym in the mornings as I am already on the bike so it will take no effort to practice manuals, it will also make the ride go faster as well 🙂