Winter Miles, Wet Roads, and the BronchoStop Blues

It’s been a while. But I have an excuse. Honest. This is a Drop Bar Diaries entry about the bit nobody posts on Strava: when the weather is vile, your lungs go on strike, and you’re convinced your fitness is dissolving with every swig of cough syrup.

There’s a particular kind of bravery required for winter training, and it’s not the heroic kind you see in glossy cycling adverts.

It’s not soaring over Alpine passes with a sunlit grin. It’s not a cinematic slow-motion sprint with cheekbones, veins and orchestral music.

It’s standing by the window in the dark, watching rain arrive sideways, asking yourself the eternal question:

Is this dedication… or is this just poor decision-making?

Winter, in other words, is the season where cycling becomes less about romance and more about paperwork. Laundry. Layers. Negotiations. The kind of training where your biggest opponent is your own sofa, quietly whispering: “You’ve done enough. Look, there’s a blanket. Come and be warm.”

And still… this is, alledgedly, where the year gets built.

The Year Has Shape Now

This winter grind has been different because it’s had a point. Actual lines in the diary. Actual reasons to keep showing up.

Mallorca is booked: April 16th to 23rd. Port Alcúdia base. Work until mid-afternoon, then ride. A Saturday and Sunday in the middle for bigger days. The Tramuntana waiting like an old friend with a slightly judgemental eyebrow .. ‘You again? You’re back for more?’

And York to Lincoln is now properly real too: 161 kilometres at the end of May. Not 161 miles, which I believed for a brief period and have still not forgiven Alan for allowing me to believe. We’ve booked an Airbnb for the night before, which is the moment it stops being “an idea” and becomes “a thing you’ll have to do with your actual body.” Ouch.

So yes. The plan exists. The structure is working. Fitness was starting to return in that suspicious way it does when you stop trying to bury yourself every ride and instead train like a functional adult.

And then I went to Yorkshire.

Yorkshire: Ironically, where Plans Go to Die

In my head, Yorkshire was going to be crisp winter air, moody but rideable roads, and a couple of steady rides with Alan up in the Dales. Even if the weather was questionable, surely I could sneak out for a short hike, keep the legs ticking over, feel saintly.

What I got instead was weather so foul it didn’t even feel like weather. It felt like an organised attempt to remove joy from the atmosphere. But the Dales still looked beautiful as ever. How does that work?

No rides. No hikes. No wholesome “fresh air.” Just wind, rain, and that peculiar northern grey that makes you wonder if you’ve accidentally entered a black-and-white film.

And the irony is, I wasn’t even there purely for cycling.

I went to see Alan and Claire and to film a Wonky Tree Bookshop event - taking author Jon Lock and illustrator Nich Angell into schools to share their children’s graphic novel Tiny Hercules. It was brilliant. Kids properly engaged. Books landing. The kind of day that restores your faith in humans. We need those kinds of days these days, don’t we?

It was also, as it turns out, exactly where I picked up a chest infection.

So yes… I went to see the bloke I’m riding Lincoln with and came home feeling less fit than I was before I saw him.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I was too busy coughing my lungs into next week to find it.

The Part Nobody Logs

This is the part of winter cycling you don’t post.

No elevation graphs. No heroic captions. Just you on the sofa with a hot drink, wondering if you’ve swallowed a small hedgehog, and doing mental arithmetic with panic.

Because cycling doesn’t just live in your legs. It lives in your rhythm, your routine, and your sense of yourself as someone who still does the thing.

When that routine gets interrupted, your brain starts telling stories. Mine more so than perhaps the next ill cyclist, or am I paranoid?

Quiet stories. Convincing ones.

All that work? Gone. Every day off is a step backwards. Every cough is a loss of fitness. Every swig of BronchoStop is basically an exit interview with your aerobic system.

It’s absolute rubbish, obviously. But winter is when your brain is most vulnerable to rubbish. Less light, less movement, more time alone with your thoughts, and an alarming familiarity with cough medicine.

The Truth (Annoyingly)

Fitness doesn’t disappear overnight.

It doesn’t evaporate because you miss a week. It fades when you stop showing up for months, not because you got ill and took the sensible option - which, for once, I did.

And here’s the cruel irony: getting back too soon is often what keeps you ill longer.

So I stayed off the bike. Not because I lost motivation. Not because the plan failed. But because lungs are quite useful, and I’ve reached the age where I’m trying to treat my body less like a disposable machine and more like something I’d like to keep using.

The Return (Light Duties, No Drama)

Eventually the cough loosened. No tight chest. No scary breathlessness. Just the odd lingering reminder that my immune system had briefly been freelancing.

And when I finally got back on the bike - gently, sensibly, obediently - something really important happened:

Nothing went wrong.

The first ride back was a tiny, boring little re-introduction. Z1. Low Z2. No heroics. No testing. Just turning the pedals and confirming I still knew how.

Then another.

Then another.

And suddenly, without fanfare, I was back in it.

Not fully. Not instantly. But enough to remind me the engine hadn’t melted.

The Great Outdoor Test

The real proof came when I finally got outside again for the first time since October.

A group ride. Five of us. Fresh air. Real roads. Actual countryside. The kind of ride that makes you remember why you put yourself through winter training in the first place.

It wasn’t “pure Z2” because unless you live somewhere pancake-flat and ride alone with monk-like discipline, pure Z2 outdoors is mostly theoretical. There were kickers, long drags, and the inevitable group-ride surges.

But here’s the key thing:

I finished feeling energised.

Not shattered. Not collapsed on the sofa questioning my life choices. Just… good. Alive. Like a cyclist. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like.

That was the moment I knew the indoor work was transferring. The base was real. The winter wasn’t wasted. It was doing its job.

Mallorca: Now Close Enough to Smell

And now we’re into the real build again.

Z2 anchors that leave me feeling better than when I started. Tempo sessions that don’t require a lie down afterwards. A proper Sa Batalla simulator block at 185W that feels like work but not suffering. Low cadence “Mallorca legs” sessions that genuinely let me imagine climbing again instead of surviving climbs.

I’ve even got a cadence sensor now, which means I can no longer pretend I’m “probably at 85rpm” when I’m actually doing some panicked 96rpm spin that sends my HR into the stratosphere.

Everything is pointing in the right direction again. The momentum is back. The plan is alive.

And most importantly, the thing that has quietly become the real victory, I’m starting to look forward to sessions rather than dread them. I’m finishing rides feeling like I’ve gained energy, not spent it. The bike is becoming what it’s meant to be: a place where effort makes you feel better, not worse.

The Point of All This

Winter training isn’t about brilliance. It’s about continuity.

The year doesn’t get won in January. It gets built through January. February. March. The messy bits included.

Especially the messy bits.

So yes, Yorkshire derailed things. A chest infection tried to evict me from my own routine. The weather did its best to make cycling feel like an administrative burden.

And still… I’m here. Still turning up. Still building. Still heading toward the Tramuntana.

Mallorca is a few weeks away now.

And I intend to arrive with lungs that work, legs that remember, and a smug little sense that the BronchoStop era is over.