Ride 08/11/2025

Today’s bunrun (a day belated since I’m writing this on Sunday) weather wise was wet, overcast but little wind. Quite a large group of us turned up, probably close to 30, don’t know why the weather was crap, but I joined the usual 2 group. Heading to the cafe I was able to take a turn leading, performance is coming back but still a long way to go before I get it mostly back. At the cafe I had my usual roll with sausage and hash browns and orange juice before we headed back again. Most people were going over knockhill, given the weather I don’t blame them but I decided to Join Paul and Colin and head for Milnathort before going through Kelty and back home. This turned out to be a lot tougher than I was expecting. I was able to again take a shot at the front but now we were flying and I was at my limit leading. Even dropping behind Paul I was still getting hammered and no chance to rest and recover 😟 I was hoping that once we hit Milnathort we would calm down a bit and take it easy from there, I was wrong. With Paul leading I was at my limit again and just couldn’t keep up, at which point I had to take the lead and slow things down otherwise I would blow up and crawl home. So I took the lead off Paul before we hit Kelty and kept the pace at something I could handle to try and recover a bit. Thankfully once past Kelty I would swing off from the group and head home on my own at which point I could slow down and recover a bit more. So 50 miles clocked up at an avg speed of 17 mph but what a cost that was. My effort was 4.7 out of 5 which too high for being off the bike for so long, normal values would be around 2-3 with the occasional 4, there is only 1 ride out of the thousands that I have done over the last 13 years that has beaten this and that was the Ride London 2023 where I was trying to ride 100 miles in under 5 hours, that was a 5 out of 5 and given the effort I had put in I wasn’t surprised at the time 😅