Mt.Faber with Carradice Bag attached....

Did this on Saturday....as usual I left earlier and met with the guys after completing 3 loops of Mt.Faber via Kg.Bahru entrance. So in total only 4 loops Kg.Bahru and 1 loop via Morse Road. The aim was NOT to let my HR shoot up and make full use of my 12-25 gearing. Well, guess what, it shot up nevertheless, to close to 180bpm. If I can get this down to 170bpm at the steepest part, I will be good but right now, still not there yet; although for the 2nd and 3rd loop, I managed with an HR of ~175bpm, not too bad at all. My reserve is up to 195bpm but I must strive to only use this reserve when required. There are up to 20% inclines at Genting, and I expect this is where the reserve is needed.

The Carradice bag and SQR mount (plus 3 tubes, 1 tyre, some cereal bars, etc) added a good 4-5kg to the load so I was really lugging up a 14kg bike! It did not seem a lot harder than without the bag, although I did go very slow at the steepest parts (~7-8km/h) but then again this is mostly because of me wanting to control my HR. Running at 39x25T, I was doing about 40rpm, and was rather surprised that I did not topple over at 7+km/h. My guess was that I could do another 5-6 loops with no issues under the same conditions. Kg. Bahru is just about the toughest slope one can find in Singapore than you can ride up on a bike and I intend to make good use of it, conditioning for TOP.

At Nicoll highway, we all did a speed test; KL broke away and we gave chase. Admittedly with the additional weight to my bike, acceleration was drastically affected and it took me a while to catch up with KL and by then Ben has already gone a good 30-40m away from us. I gave chase from about 100+m away and managed to catch up with him at the top of a slope/bridge. Not easy accelerate with load but keeping speed was ok, once I got there, of course. Managed a top speed of 51+km/h on the 14kg beast of burden.

On Sunday, it was solo ride as I needed to be home early so did not want to spoil everyone else's ride plans. Did ~60km looping Coastal-Loyang-Xilin twice. The objective of this ride is again, to control my HR, maintain it to about 130bpm for the ride. This was quite tough, especially when people zoom past you along coastal and my legs were itching to chase as I had the reserve to! At the Changi Prison (first incline), I tried to keep it at ~150bpm, tough.....went up to 158bpm I think. On the 2nd round, I made myself race up loyang incline (~1.3km). There were 2 guys already a good 400m ahead me as I hit the lights. Since I was only doing 130-135bpm, I felt strong and had a lot of reserve. I sprinted from the lights to up to 44km/h, and maintained speed above 30km/h up the slope...went pass the slower guy (on a Cervelo tri bike) can caught up with his friend at Shell station. HR shot up to 185bpm....not too bad because I know I can go up to 195bpm with no issues. Made my way back to Siglap coffee shop and incidentally, KL also went solo 2 rounds so met up with him for a drink.

Average speed for the ride is ~26km/h, Ave HR for entire ride is 131bpm. This is the lowest average HR of any rides that I've done this year. I normally hit an average of 150+bpm these days. I'm thinking of doing a couple of interesting 'conditioning' rides in preparation of TOP. Mainly....

1) looping Mt. Faber under load (8 rounds 'conserve energy' efforts and last 2 rounds 'all out' effort)

2) looping Parbury road on weekday mornings; can be considered short interval rounds

3) long steady rides 80+km, no stopping to rest.