wurple.net

Generally, pimples are unpleasant, but just an accepted part of life.

Sometimes, they can appear in annoying places. The part of your nose where your glasses nose piece rests. Or maybe on your forehead, where your helmet rests.

Then there are spots which just drive you crazy.

Not quite a cold

Over the last week or so, I’ve been suffering some kind of a cold. Nothing too serious. Although all of the aches, coughs and pains were there in a pretty mild form. So when I woke up with a sore nose, I assumed that it was all related.

Of course, as the day progressed, I realised that it wasn’t a sickness related sore nose. It was in fact, a pimple. Now I’ve had pimples on the pointy part of my nose before, but this one is different – it’s on my nostril.

The pain! The pain!

Now a pimple on the nostril is annoying and painful

Having a cold made it extra annoying given how much it hurts to blow my nose.

I also discovered how much of your face involved when you eat a hamburger. Upon opening my mouth to take a bite out of a burger, I induced a new wave of wincing and eye watering that meant I had to resort to the pansy knife & fork method to consume my burger.

But they’re all trivial things.

My special ability

On a side, but related topic, I should introduce you to my special cycling ability. Everyone has them. Sometimes they’re good powers (climbing hills, sprinting, suffering for extended periods), sometimes they’re bad. Like mine… it’s not so useful.

Remember the character Toad from the X-men?

One of his mutant abilities is to spit out a gloopy green substance that sticks to anything. In a similar way, the moment that I start to exert myself, I start to sniffle. This sniffle quickly progresses to a trickle, which becomes a downpour.

Now I’ve tried sniffling it all in, blowing it all out, tissues, hankies, HPG’s jersey and many other rememdies, but I have yet to find an effective way to deal with the issue. As such, I usually resort to a combination of all of the above, with liberal use of the snot rag section of my gloves to soak up the remainder.

Sorry to anyone who’s ever borrowed cycling gloves from me…

Of course, having a pimple in this unfortunate location makes wiping my nose uncomfortable at best… and sometimes downright dangerous. Take for example, Sunday, where a group of us were doing a recon lap for the upcoming enduro. Now it was a pretty nice day, which thankfully means that my special ability did not manifest itself in its full power. None the less, I found myself climbing a hill early on in the ride and starting to sniffle. Of course, what goes up, must come down.

So down Redgum trail we went. This is one of my favourite downhill sections in Lysterfield because it’s pedally and not too technical. Just as the pace was picking up, I instinctively swiped my gloved hand across my nose, just to make sure I could breathe properly to make the most of this downhill. The pain was… excruciating. Blindingly painful. Eyes watering so badly that I had to stop to wipe my eyes.

And it wasn’t even a very good wipe.

*sigh*

Hopefully it all clears up before Chase the Sun on Sunday.

Bah.

Wet, wet, wet.

All weekend.

That’s going to make it hard to crack the 1,000 km barrier this month.

About halfway through the month of November and I’m about on target to complete 1000 km this month. The thing I’m starting to think about is, “Why exactly do I want to do this?”

It wasn’t really a goal of mine to achieve this and honestly, it wasn’t really that hard. In fact, I’ve achieved the halfway target of 500km in the first 15 days with only half of that distance done on my road bike. Honestly, the second half of the month is just a matter of finding the time to rack up the distance on whatever bike.

The one thing I have actually realised about this is that it’s actually quite fatiguing. What I’m feeling is deep down inside – I constantly feel like I need to sleep and eat and rest and eat.

So should I do it? Should I go for the 1000 km mark this month?

Is it possible for someone who doesn’t actually “train” to over train?

In the last week or so, I’ve done something in the vicinity of 400km of riding, which is generally a lot for me. This is primarily because I decided to dust off the road bike and get some serious road clicks into me. For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been pretending to be a MTBer, but it seems that with the mild spring weather that we’ve had in Melbourne of late that the call of the road was just too great for me.

Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that TYP is having a small MCL competition for total distance travelled.

Nuh-uh.

No…

So anyway, I took Wednesday off riding to allow the body a bit of recovery time. I also skipped the Thursday commute, but busted out the MTB in the evening for a quick ~15km blast around my local singletrack.

This.. sucked.

It felt like I was riding through honey for most of the ride and no matter what gear I pushed, it felt too big. My heart was pounding and I struggled up even the smallest inclines. Of course, anyone who knows the trails around my area will also know that the inclines aren’t exactly small around my area. Poop.

After this very discouraging ride, there was the Friday commute. Now Melbourne was having some of the most solid rain for 18 months on this day and it was very windy. So maybe it was okay to struggle in this weather? I’m not sure… it was pretty discouraging though to be spinning along Cotham Road in 3rd or 4th gear on the Nexus, where I would normally be flying along in 4th to 6th gear.

Maybe I’ve just over done it a bit…

So I told someone off on Beach Road today.

In this case, I told off three blokes who kept jumping ahead of our pack as we waited for traffic lights, but weren’t strong enough to stay ahead once we got rolling.

Now this is odd on many layers…

• I’m not really a “Beach Road regular”. You know, those guys who you see powering up’n'down there every weekend and who know every single little dip and bump on the road. Well, I’m the exact opposite. Until recently, I would go there probably once every couple of months. So you know… it’s not really “my turf”… to be telling people off.
• I’m far too young to become one of the old timers who complain about how no one has any bunch skills today. Those blokes who complain about how dangerous the NRR is these days and prefer to ride within their own select bunch.
• More often than not, I ride a MTB these days, so what would I know about road etiquette?
• I’m a relative newbie to the sport. Sure it’s been a couple of years now, but compared to the real old timers, I’m just a baby.

Gee, I sure hope I don’t become one of them.

I suppose the positive side though is that the old timers seem to ride beautiful bikes. Where can I pick mine up from?