Notes from the Winter training bunker: It's snow going away, you know

At the start of January I made a winter training plan on my computer. Something to try and carry out down in the basement of my house -- the winter training bunker -- on the turbo. The plan probably looked a little over ambitious, but the idea was that if I could at least do the lions share of it, it would still be a good winters training and something to carry onto the road once the winter moved on.

Now, it is safe to say that I didn't stick with the plan entirely. When you're a rank amateur, in it for the fun of it, the real world often throws up things that keep you from going on the turbo 5-6 days per week, and so the plan often had to chop and change so that I still got the best of the workouts in, if not as often as I had planned.

Still, I came out of January with 284km in the legs and out of February (only 28 days, remember!!) with another 197km to add to it. I felt good even if I wasn't losing the weight I had hoped to lose quite as fast. That takes more discipline on the dieting side of things, but it's something that will come in time. As far as I was concerned I was feeling fitter in my legs and that's what I wanted. I didn't want to go out on the road come spring and struggled to cover 15k because I'd say on my backside doing nothing but eat a little less over the winter.

March has seen the training scaled right back for various reasons and so the plan as it stood coming into the month has simply been rerouted to start up again in the middle of the month. With 481km done in total for the first two months I hoped I might yet go through the 1,000km barrier by the end of March, in time to hit the road. That may not happen, but thanks to mother nature, I might yet hit the big one thousand.

The snow has not relented here in Southern Ontario. Having our harshest winter in most peoples living memory, it has snowed and it has snowed a lot. The temperatures have been arctic and I sometimes feel as though I've burned more calories shoveling snow than I have spinning on my turbo (11,877, to be exact). As a result it seems clear I'll be on the turbo for a little longer than expected/hoped. I'd still prefer to fall short of the 1,000km if it means getting outside for a ride, but I'll look for the positives in the latest foot of snow we received yesterday and the -27oC (with the wind chill) that I woke up to this morning.

I'll get the training plan back on course, work some more on them sprint and climbing intervals and try to make some headway on weight loss until this snow finally does clear and the temperatures move into the positives for a decent ride in the fresh spring air.