Back on a bike

Tuesday, 11 July 2023

Jo returned to Hobart on Tuesday, leaving me to my own devices for the rest of the week.   It was a fairly un-eventful week of working but I did go for some nice runs and some nice paddles outside of my work hours.  

The best day for me was Saturday, when Jon returned from Hobart and our friends Mick, Miesha and Mikayla arrived for a few days of activities. We had home made pizza for dinner and made plans for the following days.

Miesha came with her surfski as well as a borrowed ebike, which is something I've been meaning to try for months, but for various reasons like bad weather and my hesitance to go by myself, it hadn't happened yet.  So while I waited for everyone to arrive I braved the rain and rode into town on my normal bike and swapped it for a rental ebike.  

It took a bit of getting used to but by the time we headed out on Sunday morning to do the Dreaming Pools loop, I felt confident. The major difference with an e-bike (for me anyway) is that there is WAY less suffering on the hills, which I generally dread riding as there's no equivalent to walking pace on a bike, you are either killing yourself riding uphill, or you are stopped.  It's the same for cross country ski-ing too.  So as I hadn't ridden properly for at least a year, I wouldn't  have even attempted the ride without a bit of e-help! 

 Our plan was to ride the 4km up hill to the trail head, then get the shuttle bus up to the top of Loila Tier where most people start the loop as it's a lot higher than the trail head. Unfortunately the shuttle didn't come, so Meisha and I had to ride up to the tier (again I would never attempt that without an ebike!). I think it took us about 90 minutes of riding to make it to the top - i.e. to to the official start of the ride - that meant we'd already ridden almost 20k before we started the 27km loop - plus we would have an extra 8km to get home from the end of the loop, so we were staring down the barrel of a 50+k ride on the back of zero training.  Perfect!

So it was a big day out - I loved the loop, it had heaps of fun bits and very few scary bits, and the uphill bits were massively mitigated by the e-bike. By the time we got home some 6 hours later I was down to 1 bar of power in my bike, and zero bars of power in my legs.

While Meisha and I had ridden, Jon, Mick and Mikayla had gone out to one of the orienteering maps and done some training. They looked well rested when we got home so I suspect they were only out for an hour or so.   Nevertheless we all decided we needed to go and stand in some cold water at Binalong Bay to aid our recovery (and also we thought this would present the opportunity to purchase hot chips on the way). Unfortunately the hot chip truck had closed by the time we got there but the sea was still open for business.

Due to the super long day we abandoned plans to go for an afternoon paddle and instead focused on eating everything in the house, including a yummy eggplant parmigana that we had for dinner.