Bridge the gap.

An 'interesting' long bike ride yesterday, with a solid brick session on Saturday resulted in a massive 22:47 week against a plan of 16:25 just at the right time in the schedule.  The extra time is all down to biking, but it is the area I felt was lacking of late, so I'm as confident as I have been about the swim and bike, with just the run that will depend if the knee behaves or not.

With 5 weeks to go, these last couple and next week are key to overall endurance (if I use my old marathon training as experience), so although I was slightly under plan last week, the previous and this week more than make up for it.  I just need a good one this week and I'll be well satisfied with that.  In my marathon running days, the worst races were those where I had missed the long sessions and the best were those where I had put the long runs in at the right time a few weeks out.

Saturday was a nip round the Brigg loop at a good pace followed by a 10 mile run.  I caught up with son-in-law #3 on the bike which means I was definitely going a reasonable pace (he's much faster than me, but to be fair he did have a race the following day so was not overcooking it).  I then did a quickish transition for a 10 miler at average 8:10 pace without hardly any knee discomfort. 

Sunday was a planned 90 mile bike round the Humber (Humber Bridge, Goole, Gunness) to get the long bike in which has been missing (although I had been getting 40 miles each way biking to work).
I created a route in MayMyRide, and to make sure I kept on track avoiding the traffic on the fiddly Melton to Howden stretch I downloaded the route to my phone so I could follow it.
Unfortunately, because I started the route in the village (not at my house) it seemed to wipe the route and just start logging a ride meaning I was relying on memory for the actual route.
To cut a very long story short, I ended up in Selby way off my plan (thanks to asking a local cyclist the best way to Goole); had 2 punctures; walked into Goole for about a mile; found a shop selling puncture repair kit; spent about 40 minutes finding/fixing and finding/fixing the puncture again; using all my money on the repair kit and not being able to buy a drink.
On the plus side, I did do 119 miles at a reasonable pace (if I exclude stopped time) and didn't feel too bad at all when I finished.  My new saddle had arrived on Friday and was bit wary of using for such a long way, but I needn't have worried, it's much more comfy than the old one with only a slight abductor discomfort to show for it.