So the first full commute is done.
As if to welcome me back, Melbourne threw at me a bit of everything. It was dark, there was a bit of drizzle, some crosswinds and to top it all off, I punctured about 1.5km home.
But you know what?
I didn’t really suffer as much as I was expecting.
Despite all of the best intentions to hit the hotel gym exercise bikes while I was away, I didn’t manage to do it once.
There were excuses.
Lots of them.
It’s too hot. It’s too humid and I’ll sweat myself dry. I just ate – being in SE Asia, this was something I was constantly doing. I need to sleep early tonight for tomorrow’s work then flight, which could have accounted for approximately half of the evenings of my trip.
Blah blah blah.
All just excuses. However, I know that the fact is, the reason that I don’t do it is because… it’s just no fun. Honestly, there’s nothing that bores me more than the thought of sitting on the spot, drowning in my own sweat and going nowhere.
So you’d think that on arriving back in Melbourne, I’d be back on the bike in a flash.
Wellllll, no. I’m actually dreading the first commute.
It’s going to be cold – somewhere between five and ten degrees celcius, after my body had adjusted to two weeks of somewhere around the 30 degrees celcius mark. I’m going to be disorganised – for me, riding to work involves being very organised to make sure I don’t forget anything. Most of all, I’m going to be unfit and that just makes me unhappy.
But I’m going to suck it up and do it anyway tomorrow…
So this weekend saw me hit the MTB trails twice, both for relatively short rides.
Saturday was a relatively slow ride around Westerfolds with HPG on a new-old bike (more on that another time) and Sunday was a solo smash of Lysterfield.
One thing that surprised me is that I wasn’t really unfit and unco as I expected. Sure I was slow, but I hadn’t really lost any of my flow. In fact, I reckon I was hooking up better through some of the corners and flowing pretty well, despite riding my skinniest set of knobblies.
The thing that got me though was my arms and shoulders. Aside from the fact that my OUrys were slipping, my forearms and shoulders were killing me by the end of the ride. This made lifting speakers quite difficult on Sunday.
But that didn’t stop me hitting Lysterfield on the Jamis…
Now I don’t MTB solo very often, mainly because of the safety factor. However, it was a Sunday afternoon and the weather was spot on, so I knew that I wouldn’t be alone on the trails. One interesting thing about riding solo is that because I have no one to chat to, I just don’t stop riding. At most, a rest stop is 15 seconds to take a drink and adjust the straps on my hydro pack, then I’m off again.
I think this is where the lack of fitness really shows up, especially since I was riding two days in a row. Usually, I ride Lysterfield entirely in the middle ring, except for a couple of longer big ring descents. This time. The sad part about this ride was the numbers of times I reached for the granny gear while doing pretty simple climbs.
Quite depressing really.
Oh well. Only one thing to do about it…
Get back on the bike and keep pedalling.
So it’s been quite quiet here for a month or so.
Injury and forgetting my domain name renewal aside, I’ve actually been out of the country on holiday. I contemplated writing here a few times, but decided that it’d be far better to spend my holiday time doing holiday stuff.
But…
I’m back.
And very unfit.
I’ve actually been back for about a week now and so far, I’ve only been on the bike once. I’ll have to admit, I almost fear starting to cycle again. It’s interesting that at times of physical fitness, I actually crave the opportunity to suffer and slog up a big mountain. Yet, at times of unfitnes, when the pain and suffering come oh-so-easily, I just shy away from it.
Oh well.
I reckon I’ll have to get back to it this weekend.
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