I might have been stupid, but at least I was resilient

The Doc's old training diaries reveal old-school levels of lunacy

- Michael Hutchinson

In the days before online training apps, I kept track of my training on paper, in a diary. Recently, trying to settle an argument about the date of a particular race, I fished a 20-year-old one of these out of the attic so I could check.

It took me a long time to find the race. I kept being distracted by the training details. I vaguely remember training quite hard in that era. But not as hard as the diary recorded.

A sample week: Monday, 120 miles steady; Tuesday, 110 miles steady and 35 miles with the local chaingang; Wednesday 90 miles steady, finishing at a local 10 (which, incidentally, I won); Thursday, off; Friday, 50 miles steady and 10 one-minute intervals; Saturday and Sunday, two-day stage race.

Miles rather than hours, because, as Grandpa says in The Simpsons, that was the style back then. Including the weekend's racing, that's 560 miles, or around 28 hours.