That’s what it felt like this morning and having been teetotal for over 9 years now it’s not something I’m used to. Combination of soreness from the race and allowing myself to get a bit dehydrated later in the day. A simple mistake and I should know better…

Provisional results are up for Beaulieu and put me in 7th place in the end. I’m quite happy with that, room for improvement of course, but at the same time not the best I’ve felt during a race. Can’t complain and I’m now dedicating this week to recovery and stretching to get ready for the trip to Italy and Epic Camp. Many months back wen I first thought about doing Epic it proved a useful tool putting enough fear in me to really get me training. Overall I’m pleased with how training has gone so far this year, volume has been up and I don’t feel quality has suffered too much.

I have to admit at times to being motivated by numbers – logging as many hours or kilometres of training as I can. It makes it hard to properly take a rest week when a part of me wants bigger numbers in my training diary. But I need to be fit and ready for Epic so the smart thing is to step back like last week. Reading the blogs from previous camps if I’m worried about lower numbers I think the camp will compensate. Incidentally a rough calculation makes it 380+ hours training so far this year, not that that’s too important.

Don’t normally try to blog two days in a row, I find two times a week tough enough anyway. However with the camp coming up, links to athlete blogs will get put on the site and I didn’t want that happening when the first thing anyone would read would be comments about post race soreness and badly smelling bike shoes (incidentally I got a hit from someone doing a Google search for ‘race pee’, and with this comment I hope to improve my ranking for that term)! You read some people’s blogs and mine seems far too casual and concerned with the irrelevant!

I have long abandoned hope of regaining anything from my original Blogger hosted blog. I accept that to Blogger the contents of my life seem like spam. It’s a harsh judgement, but I can live with it. My error was probably linking to a lot of different things that interested me. The spambot probably thought my ramblings combined with a lot of links was simply a cunning disguise to sell Viagra or whatever the internet drugs of choice are now. In my defence I started working with web pages, hand building HTML pages on vt100 terminals and back then linking to other things was really exciting. The first time I got access to the internet from a GUI and could put images on my page, now that was really, really exciting! These days it seems the fashion is to link less unless you have fake jewellery from Taiwan to flog.

I’m rambling on the irrelevant again and it’s time to do some stretching and get some life back in my legs. Otherwise I’m pretty prepared for the camp I think, packing list made, know the few things I still need to get hold of, bike being serviced. All gets packed up on Thursday ready to fly out Friday. Bike is booked onto flight with BA and as usual then reconfirmed when somehow they miss the details on size and weight I gave them the first time. No messing about this time.

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