Another year older

Well I am now the age I will be come race day. 52. The good news is I don’t feel any different from ten years ago really. I’m still loving getting out there and putting in the time to get to race day. To be honest I couldn’t begin to imagine being a couch potato.

For my birthday weekend Deb booked us into the new Peppers resort on the Gold Coast. It was a very nice complex, great facilities and the standard of the rooms was very high. To top it off we had a great sunny balcony with nice sea views.

Usually when we go down to the coast I ride down. It is anywhere from 90-100k depending on what part of the coast we are at, and also on whether I get lost. The very first time I rode that route all I had was some scribbled notes to get on the right roads. That day I ended up with about 15k of “detours”.

The bulk of the route is on the service roads that parallel the highway but there is potential for mistakes at every motorway exit as you typically have to negotiate a multi exit roundabout and I have taken my share of wrong roads off these roundabouts. Pretty much got these nailed now though and the run to Broadbeach is locked in around the 93k mark now.

Anyway on this occasion I decided to turn this on it’s head and ride back home from Broadbeach. I was hoping for a nice tailwind but this didn’t work out, and in addition to this was hitting the hilly part of the route at the end when you’re a bit tired instead of at the start when you’re good and fresh. Anyway it was a beautiful Queensland winter day and the ride was very pleasant. You can see how nice the day was from this picture of the Dreamworld Tower of Terror. A beautiful blue sky, Dreamworld is around 1/3 of the way so thought it was worth a snap. For the uninitiated people pay to drop from the top of the tower.

The route back:

This was mapped on MapMyRide as at this point I was still technology free.  During the week a friend of mine loaned me his GPS logger (to stave off the data withdrawal symptoms).  You can see from this pic that it is a really basic unit but it gives great results.

 

Here is a map of my ride logged Sunday, amazingly accurate tracking.  This is a great ride and I usually add a variation each time to keep it fresh.  It’s miles out in the country for a lot of it and the short rise at 40k is a killer.  See the elevation graph below, the little bump usually has me stamping out in the granny gear trying to keep moving forward. 

Elevation

 

Anyway June is coming to an end and again I am going to fall short on overall hours. On the positive side some consistency is coming into play with the running and the long rides are pretty consistent.  The focus needs to be on getting some double ups in to the schedule, i.e. training twice a day.  I am not travelling next week so will make the most of that opportunity.

The other big item on the to do list is to plan out some races over the coming months.  As mentioned previously the Gold Coast half Ironman has been cancelled for 2011, so this means finding some alternative.