I was up a bit early this morning but feeling very groggy. Mid-week, late nights will do that to you.
So what do I do? Go for a ride of course. I decided to extend the commute out a little bit to help shake off the cobwebs and found myself riding along the Yarra.
So peaceful.
Turns out that it’s a pretty decent way to get to the office too, because it excludes some pointless climbing.
So I recently upgraded my Samsung Omnia II to Windows Mobile 6.5 and one of the nifty little apps I discovered was the Facebook application. No more web Facebook for me! It appeared that Microsoft had finally embraced Facebook and built an app that provided the proper functionality without all of the scaling issues that happens with mobile sites.
Or so I thought…
There were a few initial niggles, such as the need to constantly hit the ‘Refresh’ button, even after opening the app. Minor things really, because the ‘Refresh’ button is actually quite big. Also, not being able to see the wall post you’re commenting on can be annoying. But I can live with that.
Then I realised that I couldn’t see people’s comments. In fact, I could only see my comments. Isn’t commenting a key part of the ‘networking’ that is ’social networking’? I figured that this might be buried in a menu somewhere, but no amount of clicking, sliding or dragging has revealed people’s comments.
What the heck? Am I just using it wrong?
In the mean time, I have reverted to the web version…
So the other day, I was out on the local trails at Lysterifeld Park, doing my own thing. I like to ride here alone sometimes because it’s close to home and it’s popular enough that if I do happen to come to any grief while I’m riding, I know that someone else will be along in a minute. I also happen to know the trails very, very well, having done scores of laps in both directions, in both full sunlight and pitch dark.
I enjoy riding alone, especially on trails that I know really well, because I can settle into what’s probably something that’s a bit of a roadie-tempo. It’s something of a solid tempo that simmers away for a long time, just below what I’d consider a hard ride. Probably reflects the fact that I spend a lot of time riding on the road.
Just riding along, lost in my own thoughts, enjoying a glorious mid-summer day, legs ticking over and hooking up the corners nicely.
Brilliant!
So it’s Monday morning.
I walked into the office, started up my computer and the first three applications I opened promptly crashed.
Is this an indicator of the week to come?
Not a whole lot of time in the last week to commit to the unicycling adventure. It has progressed outside now as my hallway proves to be a bit too confined a spot to practice in. With the progression to outside, I’ve now also donned the helmet and wrist pads.
Watching more YouTube videos, it appears that the accepted way of getting off a unicycle is backwards. Forwards apparently is no good and honestly, I’m inclined to agree with that. Unfortunately, I did also discover how not to get off last night and made use of my wrist guards.
Thank goodness for the 90’s rollerblading craze that led me to actually owning a pair of wrist guards.
So it’s now 2010.
How better to begin the new year than by seeing how unfit I’ve become over the Christmas period. Having lived a nice distance away from the 1 in 20 ever since I’ve started cycling, this has always been my testing ground. Of course, I’ve never really been too scientific about my testing, I’ve always just ridden out there, gone up, looked at my watch, come down, then gone home.
No power meters, no HRMs (well, I danced with this idea for a while, then gave up out of sheer laziness), no real planning to make a PB. It honestly always just been a test of how I feel on the bike.
Anyway, on Sunday, I did my first of what will no doubt prove to be the first of many ~40km loops for 2010. My time was…
23 minutes.
Hmmm. Something has clearly slipped from my 19:22 that I set late last year. Anyway, not to worry, I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular and at least I know what I’m aiming for.
So I turned around and headed back down the hill. Being a bit of a cool day, I had pulled on my wind vest at the top. As it turns out, a cool day can become a cold day on a mountain descent, so I reached up with my right hand for the zipper on my vest and pulled it up.
Then then problem began.
As I pulled my hand away after doing the zip up, I discovered that my full fingered glove had actually snagged on my zipper and I was fast approaching a corner. As they say, when faced with an imminent disaster, time seems to slow down, so as I approached the corner, many thoughts ran through my mind.
Thankfully, that was what I settled on. I jammed on my rear brake, swung out wide, let go of the brake, outside foot down, weight slightly forwards (*clench*) and committed to what is the fastest one handed corner I ever want to do.
Probably one of the best corners I’ve ever actually ridden on the road bike in fact.
Out the other side, back on the straight, I was back on the rear brake, pulled up and untangled my right hand.
*gasp*
*phew*
So after a few stalled attempts at getting on to the unicycle, I’ve finally been able to devote some time to it. It’s… uhhh… tricky.
Before I got on, there was some prep work to do…
So armed with a well built uni and more head knowledge than I knew what to do with, I wedged myself between the hallway wall and a chair and hopped on.
It’s tricky…
Very tricky…
In my first 30 minutes or so, I did manage to build up to balancing on the spot for about 5 seconds. All that time I wasted learning fixie tricks has obviously paid off because I actually felt reasonably comfortable on it. Sure it’s not EASY, but I wasn’t nearly as wobbly as I expected I was going to be.
There were however a couple of learnings….
Hopefully I get to spend a bit more time on it tonight…
I have a new toy to play with, courtesy of C.
What is it?
Oooh a tyre
Starting to take shape
Ta-da!
Classy headbadge
Anyway, it’s a 24″ unicycle from unicycle.com. The assembly instructions were nice and clear (not that I really needed them), and it seems like a very solid unit. It also comes with a classy whitewalled Kenda tyre. Nice to see some real bike brands!
Despite being just a smidge under 6 foot tall, I needed to chop off a bit of the seatpost to make it work for me, but that probably also means that some of my friends can try it too.
Let’s hope I don’t hurt myself too badly learning to ride this thing.
So I’d heard a lot about this mythical place - J’s Surf and Turf. $28 for all you can eat Japanese and run by actual Japanese people. Sounds like a good deal hey? Well I finally got to go last night.
A bit of background first. I quite like Japanese food. For anyone who’s seen me eat, this might seem strange because I do tend to eat large amounts of food very quickly, which doesn’t really go down very well at Japanese places, where serves a often quite small and delicately prepared. I should point out that I am not one of those typical SE Asian types who seems to have a fetish for everything Japanese (although I do own a Japanese car), took Japanese as subject in school/uni, went to Japan to teach English and watches hours of anime. Rather, my interest in Japanese food is that I like tasty food - all sorts of interesting flavours.
So with the possibility of being able to try every single flavour on the menu for $28, I couldn’t really pass it up.
Of course, we had to get there first, which proved to be quite a chore. The reason I held out going to J’s for so long is that it’s in Brighton (131 Were Street since I hadn’t mentioned it before), which is a royal pain in the backside for me to get to. Traffic down Nepean Highway was grindingly slow and as usual, the rain made people drive like stupids.
But we did get there eventually and my folks had already started to order. The oysters (which you have to pre-order) were just oysters. Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of oysters, but they seemed to be okay. The takoyaki octopus balls were quite tasty, although had a bit more sauce than I liked. The agadeshi tofu seemed to be a bit too dense. The serve of prawn tempura was massive, however the batter itself was kind of heavy and the prawns tasteless. Teriyaki chicken was quite good and not too sweet. The beef salad was quite tasty, although again drowned in sauce. Sashimi again came in a very healthy serve and tasted okay, although was lacking a bit of firmness. The sushi was very cold and the rice was hard. Croquettes were actually quite good.
Sounds very average doesn’t it?
I will forgive it however because the service was excellent. We never had to wait long to get service and the food arrived in a flash. Unlike some other all-you-can-eat places where you order through a waiter, we didn’t sit there waiting for ages, trying to get a waiter’s attention. In fact, a waiter seemed to be hovering nearby all the time and ready to pounce the moment someone even looked at the closed menu.
Dessert was a very simple affair. vanilla ice cream & fruits with jelly snakes & chocolate coins. Very un-Japanese, but somewhat satisfying.
So overall, I’m really not sure how to rate this place. Food was quite average, but it was sufficiently cheap for all you can eat Japanese seafood. Serves were generous and service was generally quite good. Maybe I’m rate it descriptively rather than a score. I’d rate this as a place I’d go with a group of friends because it’s a bit of fun, but not really somewhere I’d go for a special event. If it wasn’t so far away, I would probably go back more often, but given the time and effort to get down there, I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything.
So for the month of November, the race towards the finish line in the TYP really started to get interesting. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but my bunch of riding buddies (TYP) are quite widely dispersed across Melbourne and in fact, the world (mostly London at this point). As such, we find it hard sometimes to get out on smashing fast rides where we push each other deep into the suitcase of courage.
As such, we’ve devised a way of racing each other through logging of stats on MCL. It’s a pretty loose sort of game, since we base it solely on distance traveled and make no allowance for the fact that some of us ride MTBs as well as road bikes.
Either way…
It’s the end of the year, so this is where it gets interesting - we’re all racing for end of year honours. I’ll admit that the cross-continental aspect has made it particularly interesting, as Norm put in massive distances on big organised rides over in the European summer. Meanwhile, back home, we’ve all just been waiting for the warm weather when we can really get out and put up some decent distances. As such, Norm has had the yellow jersey quite firmly in his grasp for quite some time.
However, with a good long string of warm days in November, Keith and I had a good dig and now the three of us are neck and neck and neck. In the end, Keith did pip me at the line for stage honours (month of November win), however I do now have a bit of a lead over him for yearly stats.
Some interesting things about this months stats however. Firstly, I managed to be competitive without riding my road bike once. Most of my monthly distance was actually done on my folding bike. Then there Mt Buller on the MTB where I clocked up any distance travelled, but did a crazy amount of vertical.
Not to say that I didn’t try to be a roadie this month, but basically circumstances would have it that I always just had the wrong bike. In fact, there were exactly two rides, when I attempted to be a roadie - one RRR, I woke up to find a rear wheel flat on my road bike. So I did the sensible thing and swapped over to my fixie for a hill ride. The second time was an aborted MTB ride, which turned out to be too wet and slow and actually became a Beach Road ride… on the mountain bike.
Both of these rides took me back to a place that I’d actually kind of forgotten about - the pain cave. Yes, that place where it burns oh-so-bad yet you still push harder and harder as if you can somehow chase away the burning.
The pain cave is actually something I’ve been thinking about for six months or so. I’ve actually been thinking back to early days when there was only one bike and a ride down Beach Road was a leg smashing, heart pounding, lung burning effort to keep up with the bunch. Sure I still do hard rides, but for some reason, I just can’t think of many rides lately where I really have had that feeling for any extended period.
Maybe it’s because I’ve become something of a plodding slow commuter type. Just nice and comfortable, solo riding and just making sure that I can ride as many days as possible during the week. Meanwhile, most of my weekend rides have become short blasts on the MTB or chatty group rides, where I run at about 60%.
However, those two rides really brought me back to that place.
Firstly, taking my fixie along for the RRR. Never quite being comfortable with my cadence and having to spin like a lunatic down the hills or stand and smash my way up the hills. There was no slacking off. Then there was the hard grind up Alto Avenue where I’m sure my cadence wasn’t far off dipping into single digits. The fixie also made it quite hard to get a decent run up on Wonga Road and I had to stand for pretty much the entire ride.
Then, riding my hardtail down Beach Road. Catching the tailwind on the way down to Black Rock and actually running out of gears while listening to the buzz of my knobblies on the tarmac. Then turning around and smashing my way back into the head wind and getting into as much of an aero tuck as possible with a riser bar. Of course, there was no slacking off and hiding in the bunch - I tried to get myself up the pointy end of the bunch as much as possible.
But you know what? Both of these rides were great! Digging really deep and realising that if I didn’t mash down on the pedals one or two more times, I’d come to a standstill and topple down Alto. Or maybe it was spinning my guts out at top gear trying to keep up with the pack until my head’s spinning and I’m ready to hurl.
Awesome stuff!
There’s something familiar and comfortable about the pain cave…
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