So, before all the cycling starts, I figure I should lay the groundwork for what follows. My plan was to ride 1000km per month in the lead up to departure and lose as much weight as possible. The former was reasonably successful, the latter less so.

Above is the record of my training since Jan 1st, expressed in weekly TSS (Training Stress Score - blue bars) and overall fitness level (red line). Simplistically, increasing the weekly TSS will lead to increasing levels of fitness.

January got off to a good start with a very big week down at the Tour Down Under and then decent amounts of work into February. The end of Feb. and beginning of March were a bit of a wash-out in Sydney which hampered things somewhat, but once that was dealt with I managed to get some solid work done through until mid-April, where my CTL peaked around 82. The last two weeks before jumping on the plane say me getting last-minute things organised and as much work stuff out of the way as possible which saw the training take a bit of a hit, but if I’m honest I was quite tired after a series of solid back-to-back weeks.

Summary:
Jan: 1054km
Feb: 895km
Mar: 826km
Apr: 1317km

Net result is that I got on the plane with about 4400km in my legs since Jan 1st which is the most I’ve ever done by this stage in the year. My CTL of 76 is also quite a bit more than I’ve ever gone to Europe with before.

As for weight, well that dropped form 89.5 in Jan to 85kg in May. Not too bad, but I probably doll have lost another few kg if I’d actually been careful about what I ate. Almost all of that weight loss is simply from doing more cycling.

Anyway, I’m here now and we’ll see what happens.