Why it is Friday and I’m still sore from last Friday!

Today is Friday, I have knocked off work for the week, and planning to go on an extra long mountain bike adventure with Nick in the morning – but I’m still slightly sore from last weekend! Last Friday, I went for a reasonably hard road ride after work. Not an ultra long distance by any means (40km) but quite a hard ride due to the gradient of one particular road I rode up. I came to have to ride up this darn steep road because I firstly road down it which was quite an adventure in itself. I’ve riden past the turn-off to this road but never gone down it for the fear that I’d have to ride up it again, as it was labelled as a “no through road”! The gears on my road bike are considerably harder than my mountain bike (and I’ve grown up using mountain bike gear ratios not road bike gear ratios), so this is a genuine concern for me. I decided the hell with it, I’ll give it a shot. Because I haven’t riden my road bike for a few months, it was difficult to let myself hit high speeds without getting scared, so I was holding the brakes hard all the way down. There were many turns which I had to slow down for too, so the brakes really got a hard workout. Eventually I got down to the bottom of this “no through road”, and there was a dirt driveway with a big fierce “private property” sign not letting me continue. This was at this point:

So I stopped and put my feet on the ground for a few minutes to stretch out. Part of my “on bike stretching procedure” involved my leg rubbing against my front wheel, which was an incredibly painful experience as the rim burnt my leg! It was so hot from all the braking, it actually burnt my leg! Not believing how hot it was, I touched it with my hand. Steam from the oily sweaty sunblock hand confirmed the suspicion that it was in fact bloody hot! I was worried that the tyres were going to pop, so I just span the wheels in the air for a while to let them cool down, before I commenced the gruelling ride back up the hill. I came only about 50m from the top (probably 500m total length back up) where I had to stop as my heart was going double time, and my quads were about to explode with strain. So this is what made Friday’s ride so hard! The total vertical ascent for this ride was 1350m.

On Saturday, I just went for a 64km ride through the hills and down to the beach (total vertical ascent 1270m). Some random cyclist yelled out to me at Stirling to get my help to find out how to ride back down into the city. He was from Melbourne, here to watch the Tour Down Under cycling race, as it was the first year that the Tour Down Under is part of the Pro Tour international cycling calendar.

On Sunday I was a little sore but went cross-country mountain biking with Nick. This ride was ridiculously hard because I decided to make us ride up and down all these valleys, which totalled 2080m of total vertical ascent in only a 35km ride! If you exclude the riding on the way to the trails, the average gradient of the trails was very close to 10%. Overall the ride was really difficult because we just didn’t have enough fluid to safely continue, and we were really hungry!

On Monday (public holiday) I ran 23km around the foothills, and then to Mt Lofty and back via the main walking trail. I ran through a park in the foothills and found this lizard. Can you see him? He’s very camoflauged:

I had only intended on doing an 8km run around the foothills, but I bought a Powerade at the Waterfall Gully cafe, and found a tap in the car park by the creek to fill up my little drink bottles that strap onto a waist-belt I use for long runs. So that’s when I decided to just run up the hill to the summit. I bumped into a colleague from work at the summit, and a couple friends from school on the way down. ….Adelaide…. The really painful part is running back down the hill, and because I was really bending my knees to avoid damage to my feet and knees, my quads suffered a huge amount of pain. I ran down the hill hard, using my quads as suspension, and could really feel my quad muscles consuming themselves for energy as I had very little left. Three Weet-Bix just doesn’t cut it for this sort of run! The total vertical ascent for this run was 2630m!!

2 days later was the sorest, but I’ve pretty much made a full recovery now and ready for tomorrow mornings epic cross country mountain bike adventure!