The challenge gets clearer

Today I went for a tentative ride through the frost and the sludge and the grit and the salt, just to see how much work there is for me to do over the coming weeks - to see how bad things really are.

They're bad. I covered 23 miles at an average speed of 16mph and felt as though I was really pushing myself. It didn't help that I had a stiff, freezing easterly breeze to pedal into on the home straight but that's really neither here nor there. I didn't have any hills to contend with either but I was still completely knackered when I got in.

To put this into perspective, I need to be able to sustain that pace for the entire six days and 874 miles in just six months' time.

I still think I'm capable of it but if there was any small part of me that might have been thinking that this wouldn't be a major fitness challenge, that small part withered and died today. I need to make sure I know exactly what fitness progression the TRAT guys recommend - particularly over the coming month or two - and stick to it religiously. In about a month I'm going to need to be able to cover 70 miles at this pace without killing myself ignominiously in front of my fellow TRAT riders - and if the fear of ignominious death doesn't keep me going on those training runs I don't know what will.

On the plus side, my rather tasty new satnav unit worked a treat today, giving me the same speeds, times and averages as my little bike computer, but also simultaneously plotting (and saving) my course and making all sorts of other calculations I've not even got my head around yet. I think this will be an invaluable training tool - not to mention a handy thing to have for the ride itself.

It's one of these Garmin Dakota 20s (pictured) - as recommended to me by a nice fella at the Cycle Show in October - he was wearing a Garmin shirt, funnily enough. The instructions, which don't come in printed form but as a PDF on a CD (yeuch!), are hopeless but luckily it's reasonably intuitive so after a small amount of head-scratching and screen prodding I've actually managed to make it do something vaguely relevant for me. I'm so impressed with my own geekery that I can hardly speak.