well, my first year away from home for christmas and its a little strange to be without the usual traditions and habits that accompany the time of year - not being madly busy at work, client drinks, chritsmas parties, and looking forward to a free week off - its also exciting and liberating to be able to choose exactly how to spend the day.
So, with the forecast or 27 degrees, sunshine and light winds, we choose to a BIG ride. only 120 miles on plan, but to Akaroa and back from Christchurch has an alternative route along the Summit Road. This involves a lot of climbing, and some spectacular scenery. You'd need a long day to do this ride, and we thought - what better day. To add to the adventure, we were not expecting that there would be any thing open en route for supplies (not that there IS much en route!) so were carrying a lot of bars with us. It was quite a bonus to arrive in Akaroa after 4.5hrs and discover tat there WAS actually a sore open, and had a picnic of icecream and crisps. Given that we still ate almost all of the food that we had carried, this was probably a god send and saved the last hours of the ride from becoming a very un-festive miserable suffer-fest! Even so, 7 hours in and at the foot of what i knew to be with the longest steepest climb of the day, a silly hat and box of Quality Street didn't seem like such a bad tradition....8.5 hrs later, we were both pretty frazzled ( it always pleases me when steven is tired too - in fact since he's still sleeping, i think MORE tried!!) we very efficiently put together our christmas dinner of roast beef, drank wine, and failed to stay awake throughout Shawshank Redemption.
With that silly amount of riding yesterday i'd clocked over 30 hours since monday, with another 7 or so scheduled for this weekend - a big week. Good preparation for Epic Camp which starts on the 2nd. There has been a definite riding focus to my training and I'm pleased to say that i am now starting to feel my legs coming through. i have been feeling good on the bike through some good, focused rides. I'm sure gonna need good legs for 15 days of hard group riding in Epic Camp. It'll be so much harder, less enjoyable and very demoralizing to be dropped by the group everyday - so my main goal for this camp is to stick with a group on the bikes. 15 days of that and i should pop out the other side really strong for IM NZ.
more thoughts on that later....
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