A long Good Friday

Blogreader James commented that he 'wanted a little more single-coil action'
so here is a picture of the pickups from my '54 Strat.

Good Friday is one of those glorious traditional British public holidays that doctors either love or hate. If you're on-call it can be miserable. The human body is no respecter of religious calenders, so people are just as likely to fall ill on a bank holiday as on any other day. The trouble is that we still run our hospitals on old fashioned lines with small teams of on-call doctors who are responsible for the well being of large numbers of patients. All routine work stops in radiology, and the expensive equipment sits idle. This is not good when this becomes a four day break at Easter, and the on-call X-ray team can work their socks off. Anyway, I'm lucky this year, and I've tacked on some annual leave so I'm not back to work until a week on Monday.

No time to cycle yesterday. A 20 hour day began at 5am when I got up early to take my daughter across the Island to Ryde where she had an ice-skating lesson. Back home, then to Newport for an Easter Under 11's football tournament for my son's team, Cowes Panthers. Played 3 , lost 3 unfortunately, but he scored a nice goal. I suffered under the unseasonal hot sun and felt very washed out by teatime. Then, gear in the car, and we drove over to The Fountain in Sandown for another Riptide gig. Home, unload, cup of tea and toast before getting to bed at 1-ish.

Today, more football for the Panthers. Played 2 games with one win, and my son scored the winning goal in the final minute. What a great feeling, even if it's only a small victory.

I'm planning a shortish ride later today at pace to include a circuit up a particularly steep hill near Brighstone. I have a colleague at work who did the Etape last year up L'Alpe de Huez and his training consisted almost entirely of repeatedly riding up and down this hill ad nauseum. It's the first warm weather riding of the year so I can try out my new bits of kit from Bioracer. I have new gloves, short sleeved base layer and snazzy socks. I've realised I still need a summer jersey of some sort.

I might experiment with my wife's heart rate monitor and see where my heart rate is running during today's ride. I'm not overly enthusiastic to embrace HRM training techniques. Essentially for a one-off endurance race such as this I simply need to get on my bike as often as possible and acclimatise mind and body to reeling off those miles in a variety of conditions. I'm not aiming to become a club racer or to slowly improve my speed to compete in time trials. The psychology of endurance events has always interested me. In 1983 I was a final year medical student in Liverpool. I entered the inaugural Mersey Marathon and did a bit of half-hearted training around Southport where I was posted for my surgical attachment. I recall that my longest pre-race training run was two and a quarter hours. I simply couldn't cope with the boredom of these long runs. Obviously, on the day of the race I had to run for well over three hours and hadn't done enough training. I suffered badly for the last 5 miles. We had no energy drinks, no notion of carbo loading. I can't even remember any feeding stations. I wouldn't be surprised if we all went for a drink the night before the race. In the end I do recall that it was agony. After crossing the finishing line, I was so stiff I couldn't even lie down comfortably, and had to let myself topple over onto the ground like a fallen tree. But I had done the job in 3 and a half hours. Anyway, in subsequent years marathon running has become very popular and one is always seeing gaunt faced bedraggled runners loping along the roads looking very tired. I used to feel sorry for them. Now I think at least they can complete training sessions within 4 hours at the most. I've got to get my head around being on my bike for in excess of 8 or 9 hours. I know that's no big deal for seasoned cyclists, but inevitably they will have gradually built up the mental and physical resilience over many months, if not years of pedalling. Again, I'm reminded of the fact that I'm training on my own, on crap road surfaces. There is no doubt that noone will finish this event without a huge dose of determination, and I hope that includes me.

So, Happy Easter. No chocolate for we Etapists. Lets hope Wolves can turn over Sunderland today, and my son's team have a good day tomorrow.