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A very bikey Sunday

by Carl Brewer last modified 2008-05-11 20:17

Sunday was ace!

Picture this, it's around 9am on a Sunday morning.  I'm a lazy sprinter, and like to sleep in, no more of those 5:30am getups to go ride the North Road loonyride.  No way!  Sunday's plan is sleep in a bit, do some weight training in the morning after visiting mum briefly (it's 'sell a lot of flowers and cards day'), muck about for a bit on some training programs etc, then head in to DISC to train on the bike.

The phone rings.  Neil?  What's he want on a Sunday? Isn't he at some MTB enduro with the aboc MTB team (a bunch of c-nuts)?  Yes ... but he's in need of a jersey, very quickly!  Why is left to the reader to speculate on!

Ok .. I drag the lazy body out of bed, find that I have a jersey his size in stock, crank up the aboc motorpacer and head out to Lysterfield.  I take a wrong turn (it's been a while ..) and end up on the wrong side of the park, ok ... no breaking the speed limit!  I find my way to the part of the park where they are.  Motorbikes are good, I manage to thread through the maze of parked cars, vans, tents, fences etc down to where everyone is, and hand Neil a nice new aboc jersey.  He's very happy, and we'll leave the details at that.  This is the second MTB enduro race I've been to for a look and I have to say I'm very impressed.  It's laid out well, they cater for the needs of teams who are waiting for their riders to swap over very well indeed.  Imagine a huge outdoor velodrome, tents, a portable coffee shop, loads of (at least 2 anyway ...) shop displays, PA, music, it's a real carnival atmosphere.  Road can learn a lot from this.  It's all done in good humour and is very relaxed and everyone's having a ball.  It's almost possible to forget it's a race. 

While there I catch up with some old friends (g'day Simon!) and some virtual friends become real (Euan! good to meet you at last).  Cheer on Byron who's doing it solo, and the aboc team (Cam, Vanders and Neil).  I'm tempted to see if Rich and I can make a team of two to do some at 'participation level' (we're gumbies, but it looks a lot of fun).  Good bit of cross training and base fitness.

After hanging around for way too long I scoot over to Mum's for a very late breakfast, then home and into the PowerHouse (or as Vanders would have it, the PowerHaus, Arnold!).  I'm taking it a bit easy, last Tues I strained a back muscle or two, but I still manage to do 3 good sets at 190kg with partial squats.

Then Lucie and I throw all the kit for the training session into her car and we drive into DISC.  Nath's doing a course there and we're somewhat bemused by seeing a bunch of people in the infield warmup area riding around on a mixture of bikes leaning over picking up water bottles off the ground.  Ok ... I'm sure it has some relevance!  We set up, a healthy crowd comes to my session and it works well.  In particular Karen rides well and Hari Gopu, second time ever on a track bike takes to DISC like a duck to the proverbial.  He's a natural.  I think he'll be sore today, but he rode very well indeed.  Alex Vaughan is improving at a great rate, and Claire's back, no obvious signs of harm from her broken ribs.

I manage some consistant times for my flying 100's, still too slow, but at least consistant.  6.79, 6.81 etc for 100m, which is nowhere near fast enough (around 52-53km/h) but is slowly improving - I should arrange to do a session there where I'm actually trying to see how fast I can go, use a bigger gear and not do a gym session an hour before the bike.  We're concentrating on pedaling and I'm pushing about a 92" gear, so am doing about 130rpm, so that time is still pretty slow. I should be getting around 150rpm I think.  Might have to try some overspeed work with the motorbike, but who's going to drive it?  Maybe if I can get Big J to lead me out?!

Nandos for dinner, home and sleep.


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