Eight years of Mallorca, and the Lincoln run in

An Anathema, a Head Cold, and Eight Years of Mallorca

A Drop Bar Diaries dispatch that begins in Port Alcudia with a broken bike and a head cold, and ends, several weeks later, on the eve of my biggest ride of the year.

Despite best intentions, and taking a little bit of bike-bag packing tuition from Richard, my invaluable local mobile bike mechanic and fixer of my myriad attempts to destroy my bikes and subsequent botched attempts to repair them, I arrived in Port d’Alcudia to the prospect of not cycling at all.

Unduly pleased with myself that I had avoided the disaster of a bent rear mech cage after the last time I flew back from the island (a very expensive mistake I was not planning on repeating) by taking the whole derailleur off the frame before packing it, I optimistically put it back on thinking I would be riding in no time.

But that was before I remembered that my name is Tim, and I am an anathema to smooth and easy mechanical procedures.

After reconnecting the derailleur to its hanger, the first thing I noticed was that the di2 cable had loosened and fed itself from the tube. I could not persuade it back in. I reconnected it to the derailleur and, yes, the gears still worked.

The bike clamped into a stand, I started to turn the pedals hoping that the smooth shifts Richard had fine-tuned for me would still be there. They were not. The chain slipped cogs, clicking and clacking away as my head started to write stories of a disastrous trip to my favourite cycling destination.

I should add, due to the combination of a Frank Turner gig the night before and a ridiculously early alarm call for the flight, that I had had three hours' sleep and was definitely not in the right state of mind to be confronted with unexpected mechanical puzzles.

So I did the only thing I thought was right. I tried to fix it.

A few minutes later, after fiddling with the tiny limiter screws and other bits that looked like they could be adjusted, I had, inevitably, made things worse. Honestly, it is like my brain gets taken over by that idiotic monkey who persuades me that if I just twiddle this, faff with that, then the problem at hand will miraculously be solved. It so obviously wasn't.

So I left it, unpacked, and took stock. Three hours later I woke up, having fallen asleep on the very comfy bed, just in time for dinner in the hotel. Which was a stroke of luck, because I had not eaten since waiting for my gate to be called at the airport some twelve hours earlier.

The next morning, sat in the sun outside a bicycle repair shop while the very helpful local mechanic sorted out my mess, I decided that this was, in fact, a very Drop Bar Diaries way to start a Mallorca trip. The island has, over eleven visits since 2018, taught me a lot of things. One of them is that everything will probably be fine if you let the right person fix it, and order another coffee.

Eight Years In

Eleven visits. I almost cannot believe that number when I write it down. Mallorca should, by now, feel routine. A place I have done. A box ticked, more than once. It does not feel like that at all.

The roads here are now as familiar to me as the lanes around home. I know the climbs, the cafés, the wind directions, the stretches that always look easier than they are. I know where the switchbacks are, where the road surface lulls you into bad gear choices, where the promise of a beer and a club sandwich by the beach helps you make it all the way back into town. And yet, every visit, the island still does this thing where it surprises me. Around a corner I have ridden a hundred times, the light changes. The sea looks different. Some quirk of the day makes the same road feel new again.

I think the reason is that you do not really visit Mallorca, you renegotiate it. Every trip is a new conversation with the same place. You bring a different version of yourself each time. Different fitness, different head, different company, different problems, different reasons. The roads do not change, but you do, and so the relationship updates.

This was my eleventh updating. And the version of Tim who showed up this time was carrying a head cold I could not quite shake, an extra few kilos that the indoor winter had not entirely cleared, and a quiet sense of building toward something later in the year. It was also, mercifully, a version who had finally cracked fuelling, which is saying something for a man who last time out needed a jelly baby airlift up Sa Batalla.

The Week, With Its Unwelcome Companion

The week was, by any sensible measure, a great riding holiday. Glorious weather. Roads I love. A working schedule (yes, it was a working holiday) that left afternoons free for proper riding. Five rides over six days, with one rest day toward the end that wouldn't have been a rest day if it wasn't for the snotty nose and heavy head.

The head cold was the holiday companion who refused to take a hint. Not bad enough to take me off the bike, just bad enough to be present. A scratchy throat in the morning, a slight head heaviness in the afternoon. The kind of low-key passenger who reminds you they are there every time you stand up too quickly. I kept expecting it to disappear by the Wednesday. It was still hanging around on the Thursday when I flew home. By the lighthouse ride on the last full day, with the temperature reading 30 degrees plus on the climb up to Cap Formentor and the cold still doing its quiet thing, I was riding more on accumulated weeks of training than on whatever the day itself wanted to give.

But the riding was amazing. The Friday afternoon "legs and bike reliability" check (which, mercifully, the local mechanic had restored to actual reliability) was a 30-mile loop in the cooler late-afternoon air, just enough to remember how the bike feels under me on real road. Saturday was the big one, 74 miles including Sa Batalla and the long way home, finishing close to seven hours later in a haze of heat and sticky energy gel residue. Sunday was a flat 30 to the 1919 café for lunch in Port de Pollenca, the morning after the ride before, where I was genuinely surprised to find my legs felt better than they had any right to. Monday afternoon was a sharp little 20-mile out and back to take in the climb up to the Mirador at the top of Coll De Sa Creueta, fitted in around work. Then the cold won the argument, the rest day arrived without my consent, and Wednesday became the lighthouse.

Five rides, 193 miles, fourteen hours of moving time. A proper week for me at this stage of things.

Sa Batalla, an Honest Update

Sa Batalla is the climb I always come back to. Not because it is the hardest, or the most beautiful (it kinda is), or the most photographed, but because I have a relationship with it. I have a benchmark on it. A 2022 personal record of 39 minutes that I have not since matched. That's not particularly fast if you compare me to the top of the Strava segment standings, but it's pretty damn impressive for me.

I did not match it this year either. Closer to 50 minutes by the time I crested at the Repsol garage, more if you include the short rest stop just before the final steep switchbacks. And I want to be honest about that, because as you know by now, the Drop Bar Diaries does not really do the "everything is amazing" version of cycling.

What is actually true is this. I am, at around 100kg, a heavy cyclist. And it’s a harsh truth that every additional kilo of human costs you on a 5% gradient in a way that the indoor world genuinely cannot replicate. The garage is a magnificent simulator of effort, but it is not a simulator of gravity. Indoors, you can build the engine. Outdoors, on a real climb, your engine has to drag everything else with it.

So Sa Batalla in 2026 was not slower because the winter training failed. It was slower because the rider on the climb was a different one. With a head cold, in 30 degree heat, hitting the climb around 75km into the ride. The 2022 version of me was lighter, fresher, lockdown-fit, and probably had no business being that fast.

The truth I have made my peace with is that I am unlikely to beat that PR without a serious focus on weight, and the upcoming Lincoln sportive with Alan does not particularly care about Sa Batalla. Lincoln cares about durability, and durability is something I do have. Sa Batalla is a side quest now. A friend I revisit each year, not a benchmark I am trying to humiliate.

Watopia versus Worcestershire

Coming home was strange in the way it always is. The roads I left for Mallorca were grey and reluctant. The roads I came back to were green and willing. Spring had decided to show up while I was away. I rode 40 miles with my Chawn Wheeler mates on Saturday and a punchy 18 miles solo on Sunday, and it felt like cycling had quietly become enjoyable again.

And there is one small comedy in all of this.

After two solid weeks of outdoor riding in two countries, my AI coach has been very politely sending me back into the garage. For Z2 work specifically, the garage is just better. My local roads are too lumpy and undulating to hold a steady aerobic pace. There are too many rises that lure me into Z3, too many descents that drop me into Z1. To do an actual disciplined Z2 anchor session, I have to leave Worcestershire and head into Watopia. It is the most absurd geographic inversion I can think of. The real roads are too unpredictable, the imaginary ones are too consistent. Both are useful, for different things, and I have given up trying to make them mean the same thing.

A New Coach, Quietly

Worth flagging for those of you who have been keeping track. Partway through this build, I changed AI coaches mid-stream. ChatGPT has been brilliant, and a lot of the structure I am still riding is its work. But I wanted to see what a different model would do with the same data, the same goal, and the same slightly chaotic life.

I will write more about that another time, when there is more to compare properly. For now, the new coach has turned out to be fluent in the same restraint that the previous one taught me, which is reassuring. We are still pointing the bike toward Lincoln, and the plan still adapts when life gets in the way. So far, so similar. So far, so good.

Back Home, Back to Work

Coming home from Mallorca, the maths looked faintly uncomfortable. Five weeks until Lincoln, and a calendar that resembled a game of Tetris played by someone actively trying to lose.

My chimp, predictably, wanted to panic. It looked at the days ticking down and started its familiar lobbying. Cram the miles in. Do more. Do it harder. You are running out of time, Tim.

But here is the thing I have slowly, grudgingly learned over the last six months. The fitness for an event like Lincoln is not built in the final five weeks. It is built in the five months before them. By the time you are counting down the days, the engine either exists or it does not, and the job is no longer construction. It is maintenance, sharpening, and above all, not being an idiot.

So the run-in was almost boringly sensible. A long ride at the weekend. A quality session or two in the week, indoors on Zwift where I can actually hold the zones. Easy spins in between. Rest days that I no longer feel guilty about, which is possibly the single biggest change in me as a cyclist this whole year. The numbers, for what it is worth, kept quietly improving. The same efforts at a lower heart rate. The same wattage feeling a little less like a confrontation and a little more like a conversation.

The Real World Intervenes

And then work did what work does, which is arrive all at once.

I spent a week filming Marillion at Real World Studios. Four days, nine hours apiece, of moving cameras, capturing performances, chasing interviews, and the particular flavour of exhaustion that comes from concentrating very hard for a very long time. I drove home on the last night running on the sort of sleep debt that makes motorway signs start to feel halucinary.

Not a single pedal stroke all week.

The old me would have been quietly horrified. A whole week off the bike, this close to the event. The new me, coached into a calmer place, recognised it for what it was: an enforced deload. A rest week I had not planned but probably needed, arriving at more or less the right moment in the build.

And the proof came the following Saturday. I got back on the bike expecting heavy, reluctant legs, and instead found them springy and keen. The week away had not cost me fitness. It had let me absorb it. The body, it turns out, does its best work when you finally stop bothering it.

The Dress Rehearsal

Then came the big one. The last proper long ride before Lincoln. Four hours, sixty miles, 100km, alone.

The brief from my coach was specific. Ride it like a rehearsal. Find the flattest route I could, which around here is a bit like asking for the driest patch of the sea. Pace it as though I had another two hours to do afterwards. Eat early and often. Wear exactly what I will wear on the day. Find out now if anything rubs, chafes or complains.

So I did. I picked a route that involved getting over some hills in order to reach the flatter roads, because that is simply the geography I live in. I kept the effort honest. I ate before I was hungry and drank before I was thirsty. The café I had earmarked for a mid-ride stop turned out to be closed, which a few months ago would have thrown me, and instead I just kept rolling and ate what I was carrying.

Four hours later I got home with tired legs but, crucially, with something still in the tank. No bonk. No crisis. No bargaining with gravity. Just a long, steady, slightly unglamorous ride that did exactly what it was supposed to do, which was prove that the engine is ready.

That ride was the moment the whole winter quietly justified itself.

The Coach Earns Its Keep

With the training essentially done, the focus shifted to the plan. And this is where having an AI coach stopped being a curiosity and started being genuinely, almost suspiciously useful.

I fed it the route file for the Lincoln 161 and asked what we were dealing with. What came back was, broadly, the most reassuring news of my cycling year.

Lincoln is flat. Properly, comically, gloriously flat.

There is an irony here that I am choosing to enjoy rather than overthink. The first half of this blog is a heavy rider making his uneasy peace with gravity. Sa Batalla, the climbs, the honest admission that a 100kg cyclist pays a tax on every hill that lighter riders simply do not. And then the event I have actually been training for, all these months, turns out to be a hundred miles of Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire. Terrain so flat it barely troubles the contour lines. No climbs worth the name. No gravity tax. Just long, open, steady roads, which happen to be exactly what a diesel-engined endurance rider is built for.

So, the route has been broken into four segments of roughly 25 miles each, neatly divided by the feed stations. Heart rate targets for each one (if I can find my HR monitor which has mysteriously disappeared since the dress rehearsal ride). A fuelling plan measured in actual kilometres rather than vague good intentions. A pacing strategy built around the single rule my chimp hates most, which is to start slower than you want to. There is even a checklist, a proper document, covering everything from what to eat for breakfast at an unsociable hour to the faintly humbling reminder to make sure that the bikes actually fit in the car.

It is, I will admit, a slightly strange thing to be coached by. But six months in, the proof is not in the novelty of it. It is in the fact that I am about to ride a hundred miles once more, at 55, feeling genuinely prepared rather than quietly terrified. That will do for me.

Two Hurdles Left

Which leaves only the small matter of the next ten days. Because the calendar, never one to make things simple, has saved two final obstacles for the run-in.

First, Berlin. A lads' weekend, involving what has been officially classified as a "very, very, very gentle cycle tour that ends with a beer." I am choosing to file this under tapering. My coach, to its credit, agrees, on the strict condition that the word "gentle" is honoured and the word "beer" is not pluralised too enthusiastically. Yeah, we’ll see how that goes.

Second, and more alarmingly, the bank holiday Monday before Lincoln I am helping Jake move into his first flat in Bristol. A flat which is, of course, up three flights of stairs and no lift. So roughly five days before riding a hundred miles, I will be performing an unscheduled and entirely unwanted strength workout consisting of furniture, boxes, and a large leather armchair Jake has excitedly procured from a local charity shop, none of which have been briefed on my training plan.

Will a weekend of Berlin and a day of furniture-hauling undo six months of careful work?

Almost certainly not. But it would be very much in keeping with this whole ridiculous, joyful project if the final test before the biggest ride of my year turned out to be a large bookshelf and a tight stairwell.

Lincoln is on the 30th of May. Alan, my partner in this whole enterprise and the man who cheerfully entered us both into it in the first place, has been quietly stacking up his own miles around the glorious Yorkshire Dales and is, by all reports, in fine fettle. We will roll out together, somewhere in a field near York at half past seven in the morning, and find out what a hundred miles of flat Lincolnshire has to say about six months of work.

The next blog will tell you whether the man, the plan, and the slightly weary legs made it round.

For now, the bike is ready. The plan is ready. And I am, give or take an armchair and a stairwell, ready too. Pivot!

See you on the other side.