Not a ridiculous fear as I've not done a lot of bike riding since falling off going down a very steep hill and cracking my head open some 7 years ago and since my injury have only been able to actual pedal a bike for a few months.
After considering entering a bike race or similar, I decided the easiest way to overcome my bike riding worries was to enter a Duathlon before the Triathlon, so when I got to T-day I'd already have experienced cycling with a large number of other people. At this point I was also really concerned about cycling on roads with traffic, due to my tendency to wobble a lot, so I entered the Oulton Park Duathlon in April - an entirely off-road (but on tarmac!) affair at Oulton Park Race Circuit.
This gave me 2 target events to aim for, positioned nicely after the end of the XC season so as not to conflict with XC racing at all.
So how to train for this?
At the beginning of January I planned to continue with my current training pretty much as normal but adding in a couple of bike rides - one at the weekend and one spin class each week. Of course, I'm not the only person who decides to go to a spin class in January, so I struggled with getting spaces in classes and got very frustrated by this - but when I did go I found the classes excellent and they quickly improved my leg speed and technique.
I was already swimming twice a week at the gym, doing about 300-400m breaststroke each time, and given the swim in the Wilmslow Triathlon was only 400m I decided this would do fine for the time being and I'd attempt some front crawl closer to race date!
I was looking forward to trying something different and attempting a challenge I was aiming to finish instead of reach a certain performance level in. Plus the extra training would definitely help my running performances as I was very wary of increasing my training volume there given injury history.
Adding in a couple of bike rides a week...How hard could this be?
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