Well here I am sitting in the Moscow Airport Lounge waiting for my flight to Siberia......  after an excellent month of freedom.

A month off work, and if I'm honest a (very welcome) couple of weeks off cycling! (naughty naughty). Apparently though, April is the month where the main bit of training should have taken place.....oooops.

The month-off started with a quick whizz on the Yamaha R6 to Holland (so much easier than pedalling!), followed immediately by nearly 2 weeks in Oman and AbuDhabi doing what only Cav, Froomey and Wiggo can dream of....... eating pies, guzzling copious curries, downing gallons of beer and riding various peoples pride and joy motorcycles whilst thrashing the pants off a 4,500cc Nissan Patrol 4x4 through the desert for a week! Tough life.

I call it carb building.

Then in the final week of my month off I stayed in England, and returned to my "usual for the past 6 months" of cycle, cycle, cycle..... I managed 850km in the week (with over 10,000m ascent) including back to back 150km and 200km local rides and the Santini Cotswold Spring Classic (162km - 100 miles, 2,500m ascent) Sportif. This wasn't a race "allegedly" but if you sort the results I came 20th out of 175 who finished the long 162km route. Pretty chuffed with that. A total of 850 people rode the 3 distances (162km, 102km and 54km) so I was pretty impressed with my performance. Especially as I experienced a spoke breaking and thus a fairly bent and very wobbly front wheel, for the final 50km. But most importantly.... I beat the rain! I reckon this sort of ride is fairly representative of a typical TDF day.....of which there are 21 (hmmmm).

My first major crash occured in Cornwall this month, as I was descending pretty quickly down some hairpins into Boscastle. A huge dog jumped out of its owners car, and ran accross the road straight into my path. The dog was fine (bouncing around and wagging his tail, as I was picking up the pieces. He even started licking my wounds!). I bashed my knee and elbow quite heavily but I'll live. The knee ached a bit at the Santini Sportif, but its resting nicely now!

A major highlight was taking Matt on two 10km Mountain bike rides on his new 8th birthday BMX bike...... He even rode up the Crawley Hill without assistance......its 11% and 200m long. Well done mate! (He's also learning to wheelie, and performs some pretty impressive downhill skids!)

So..... only 3 weeks this time in Russia...... the static cycle awaits me.... ....... oh, and so does some work!

Back to reality.....