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Another race-free weekend for me (and a fair few others, I think) so will be out on the training ride tomorrow - 9am from the square. Weather forecast looks okay. Suggest eastwards with a few hills, since the chaingang and Tockwith provide plenty of training opportunities for the fast, flat stuff. If there's lots out we can split into two groups - decide at the time.

Eight starters for the training ride this morning - surprised there weren't more, with blue-ish skies and only a fresh southerly keeping the temperatures down. My enquiry about whether people wanted more or less hills was met with a definite "more" (My thoughts at the time:- "uh oh" ) so it was the standard easterly Malton/Coneysthorpe/Terrington route augmented by a loop out to the Acklam radio mast and a loop of the non-Highways-approved vets race circuit through Westow. I'd forgotten quite how steep that Acklam climb is - despite vague memories of pulling involuntary wheelies up it years back - and by the time we hung a left at Galley gap to rejoin the Malton road everyone looked like they were getting their money's worth.

Just before Sheriff we joined the route of whichever big organised ride passes through today (memories of the training ride a year ago where I went over the bars and Broomwagon narrowly missed collecting a handful of oncoming cyclists when he went down the road on his backside) and also picked up Yorkshire Velo's Nick Butcher and Andy Johnson - which resulted in the pace picking up again for the final run into town. 19.5mph and 248W Normalized Power for the out-of-town main chunk of the ride.

Thanks for the ride Phil and everyone else. After a quiet weeks cycling I hoped I'd be on decent form today but the opposite was true and I never properly recovered from that mast climb - what a stinker! Thanks for waiting for me to catch up, but I have to say I was quite pleased to be able to drop gracefully off after Malton and get some quality recovery time before picking up the pace again later. I rode past the Yorkshire Velo guys chilling out in Strensall so I must have overtook you while you were doing a lap of the TT route. I'm glad you didn't catch up as I've had had the embarrasment of getting dropped again the way my legs were

Just watching the Giro as they go up the Zoncolan - that is some climb! One of the motorbikes has just set itself on fire so god knows what it does to your knees

Cheers for letting myself and nick jump on the back of your group, it certainly made the ride back to Haxby easier sharing.the work into the wind. Tidy little group you had out