Finally managed to drag myself out of sleep (or at least off the sofa) and onto the turbo – 30 minutes done, via Jon’s Short Mix on Strava. I wasn’t really intending to do a workout; I had decided I would noodle about on Strava for 30 minutes, just to get my system started on the idea of morning workouts again. But, bah, plans. I logged on to find a 30 minute event about to start, in the ‘E’ category (aka, stick within a specific % of FTP and you all ride together no matter what your watts are), so I joined. Why not?

Why not was answered fairly fast at the end of the second minute of 150% of FTP … blegh. That’s the worst part of this workout (I’ve done it before). The three lots of 10 seconds at 300% of FTP aren’t as bad (because, hello, 10 seconds).

Ten minutes at 89% of FTP is also not as much fun as it could be on no coffee and no breakfast.

But, it is done, and I feel smug. So it was worth it. Now, I just have to do it again … and again …

I’ve done this before: this isn’t something wildly new – when I was training for the Ride Across Britain the first time, Strava tells me I was regularly doing early morning turbo sessions. I think some of the issue is the past 18 months of hip/leg pain, which meant I ended up on the sofa for an hour each morning letting painkillers and mild stretches pull the hip into as near submission as it was prepared to go. A couple of months of decent physio means that a lot of the pain has gone and I don’t need the sofa time any more – but there’s a substantial habit/reward system that has embedded itself into my brain around time spent sitting and reading/drinking coffee on the sofa every morning.

That said, the past two-three weeks of flu/post-flu overload as I catch up with work not done due to flu has made it really clear that the hip is better but not cured: it’s been painful for the past week. Not, thankfully, in the debilitating ‘can’t walk’ sense that it got to last year, but a sharp reminder that I cannot slack off from the gym and working on the hip with stretches/lacrosse ball etc.

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