Last week was a bit of a blur. The days keep coming and going so fast it's hard to keep track of them. I'm up to my eyeballs in work and the piles never seem to diminish. My knees got real sore, so I attempted to rest them as much as possible for a week, and thankfully by the weekend they had mostly recovered.
The sessions in the park last week were the usual hard stuff, with a squat & pushup day having us do 165 of each of them. Seriously tough, but we did it! Friday saw us playing cards (thankfully I only drew the joker once, poor Len got it 3 times!) and earlier in the week we were made to run for the next exercise, collecting random (or were they?) tasks from a collection about 100m away.
One of the reasons I was resting my knees is because I had a couple of races lined up on Saturday. The Christchurch Singletrack Club Fiesta! I had entered in 2 races - the Tranquilo and the Velovidad Solo. The night before I attempted to get both my bikes into the little convertible, and failed, so borrowed a friends cars to transport us to the Living Springs track.
I had of course forgotten to take my insulin and meter with me, so was possibly running a little high in sugars on arrival, but was feeling OK. I registered, prepared and got dressed in my '404 Mexican costume not found' set of plastic overalls. Man, it seemed like such a good idea the night before. We watched the Rapido race for a wee while and then Tracey headed off to marshal at the bottom of the very long downhill. I took the track down to the start line (bottom of the hill) and remembered very little of the track from my one and only lap of it about 6 months ago.
We started up the 4x4 farm track, a steep little climb that sucks the wind and energy out of you, especially when you hate uphills anyhow. Then it's a gradual but pretty constant grind up through 'the pines' to get to the top of the course for about 1.5km. By the time I got to the top, and began my descent, over 15mins had passed, not a good sign when the lap times are under that for the speedy buggers. The downhill was fun, lots and lots of fun, but I was hot and sweating like a piggy in my plastic bag and temperatures were ranging from roasting hot to briskly cold as I navigated the descent.
As I passed Tracey at the marshal point I stopped and stripped off my top, leaving just skin and plastic overalls. Yuk, man it was horrible in there. I realised I was losing a lot of water, more than usual and was getting very thirsty but more importantly, was getting very tired. I knew in about 200m I'd be climbing the 4x4 track and 'the pines' again. I was not mentally prepared to do it again. At this stage I had been overtaken by most of the field and could see Mel about 100m behind me. I rode half of the 4x4 track, pushed the rest, and continued uphill, stopping on occasion to have a rest. I wasn't panting massively, nor were my legs screaming, I was just exhausted, and the ride up that hill the second time had me thinking that I may have to retire before the finish - a DNF I never want to see beside my name. But after what seemed like an eternity I made it to the top with mad buggers with megaphones and soft toys and encouraging words had me revived and descending the hill for the 3rd time that day.
I passed Tracey again, mentioned my exhaustion but carried on, dreading the uphill again. It's sad that my memory of this event will be the uphill section, because I'm pretty sure I loved the downhill bits! But as I turned onto the 4x4 road again, I immediately dismounted and pushed the entire road. I remounted and started riding 'the pines' knowing it was going to be long, hard and mentally challenging. This was however the last climb, and that thought alone kept me trudging up. Corners I had managed to ride in previous laps were now pushed around, steep pinches were pushed up, and when I knew I was almost at the camp again I was ready to collapse. Still, no major cardio blowout, nor were the legs in pain, just knackered.
As I passed by the camp with about 500m to go (only half uphill) I was encouraged along again (cheers for the push Scatter!) and made it to the finish line in position 17 of 21 starters. A pretty poor show and very disappointing. I must have thought about giving up on that race 100 times. But once I was descending instead of ascending, I was OK. My last downhill had been sketchy but apart from one overly close encounter with a tree, it wasn't any slower than my previous one.
I met Tracey at the finish line (she must have run up that hill pretty fast!) and put my top back on (urgh! wet? Dripping!!) and sunk a couple of bottles of water pretty quick, and a couple of pies too. I decided there was no way I was going to cope in the singlespeed race, which was disappointing, but I could do that another day! Spectating that race was damn good fun as many singlespeed races are.
Sunday was spent inside. No hill walks, no weight sessions, just relaxing in front of the computer again. Sadly, was up till after midnight working, so something has to give there. I need more time to do more fun things or I'm going to burn out mentally rather than physically.
This week will be back to usual, hopefully we'll have more participants in the park at lunchtime too. My next big event is no longer Tekapo, it now the Twizel hard Labour weekend - all 3 events, on tandem, with Logan. Gulp.
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