No Time for Hill Training?

Kelsey found a way to train for an Alpine cycle while organising a wedding and buying a house… 

This summer my (now) husband and I decided to have our wedding and buy a house within the same month. It wasn’t planned that way. And the seven-day, 44,000 vertical feet cycling trip through the Alps that we’d committed to a year earlier with my work colleagues definitely wasn’t supposed to fall in the three week period between the house purchase and the wedding. But it did.

Working frantically to plan the wedding and close the house purchase on top of our normal finance jobs left no time for training. Cycling training is hard because it takes big chunks of time, four to six hours for a really good ride. That was a fantasy.

Instead I found a couple of training options that allowed for very time-efficient intense training that I hoped and prayed would help me on the hills. In particular I did spinning classes on the weekend mornings which proved a good ride, mostly out of the saddle, and still allowed for a day of errands – Pedal Studio in Wimbledon is good and has both Sat and Sun morning classes. I also became addicted to Wello (www.wello.com), an online personal trainer video platform that gave me a 30-min intense legs & full body workout (squats, lunges, push ups, crunchies, etc) in my home at 7am before I left for work. Great way to start the day. Knowing that my personal trainer was waiting for me (even if he was based in California) was exactly the incentive I needed to get out of bed and bust my butt.

Nothing replaces those long hours on the bicycle and we got a few training rides in, but the short intense training did keep me smiling on the hills and helped us survive through to the champagne celebration finish.

See you in France!

Kelsey