Team Boardman Cycling Plus – Lindy Edwards

khodgins | Blog, Cycling Plus | 16/11/2011 12:05pm

Team Boardman Cycling Plus  will be updating you each week with the highs and lows of their training as part of the team. This week Lindy is TRYING to take it easy…

Lindy Edwards

This week I’ve been learning that patience is a virtue. I’ve been enjoying the scenic splendour of the inside of our garage while I got back on the turbo trainer for the first time after having an arthroscopy on my knee at the Claremont Hospital in Sheffield. My knee feels good and it’s great to be doing some sort of cycling again but it all feels a bit pedestrian.

Coach Joe Beer is adamant though; I mustn’t rush the recovery. The knee is a key pivot point for cycling and I have to think long-term so that knee niggles don’t become a limiting factor in future. (OK Joe, point taken!)

To start with I rode for 30 minutes on two subsequent days with very easy resistance (39/19). The first day I kept at that resistance the whole time; I hardly drew breath and it felt a bit pointless at the time, but my knee felt easier afterwards. Then on subsequent days I moved up the gears as the feel of my knee dictated, moving back a gear or two if I felt any pain.

After the first couple of times I went up to 45 minutes, then an hour. Tomorrow – which will be eight days after I first got back on the turbo trainer – I’ll be back on the road for a cycle commute. I’m not allowed steep hills yet – they increase the torq tenfold – so will get off and push up Dean street’s 10-12% on the way home. Then hopefully I’ll be back to normal in two or three more weeks.

Then I’ll start thinking about winter training. My only goals at the moment are to be fit for a training camp at the end of February and for the Paris-Roubaix in June.  Joe’s advice is to not try to get big endurance rides in over the winter.  Apart from anything else the weather will be against me as will the fact that in Newcastle in December it gets dark each day about half an hour before it ever gets light in the first place. Apparently the training you do from November to January makes very little difference to your performance in the spring a) because it’s so far in the future and b) because you’re physiologically at a low ebb at that time of year and will recover less well from training.  Then from March / April onwards you can start building back up again.

So it looks like I had the op at exactly the right time.  Once I’m back to normal riding I need to mix riding on rollers several times a week (for 30 minutes to an hour each time) with daily cycle commutes and a 3-4 hour endurance tide at weekends. I don’t need to be completely fit before going on the training camp – the idea of a camp is that it gets you fit while you’re there.  Hmm, not so sure about that – I don’t want o  be the little shorthouse rider who’s struggling to keep up at the back of the group. But the rest of the advice seems sound.  I’m putting in an order for rollers as we speak!

Who are Team Cycling Plus?

Team Boardman Cycling Plus  are readers Sean Lacey, Alan Thew, Lindy Edwards and Chris Bowler. We’ll be following them in the magazine for the next few months as they train towards their personal cycling goals under the guidance of coach Joe Beer and other experts and we will be publishing their weekly trials and tribulations here too. For regular updates check our Twitter page and the Team Cycling Plus 2011 Facebook page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Blog, Cycling Plus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.