So I'm sitting on my bed with laptop not doing much, reading through some news, when a ping alerts me that someone mentioned my name on facebook, only to find I'm being 'accused' of being 'under cover' because people only hear about me but don't see me, so anyway I respond about my endeavours over the last few weeks, to realize almost with shock that I've challenged myself to lots of suffering this month so let's just tally up the challenges:
- Ride every day of the Tour de France (that includes rest days)
- Day 1 of Challenge 1 happens to coincide with Nissan Trailseeker #2 Hakahana and sado-masochist had entered the 60 odd Km 1300+m marathon edition.
- I signed up to attempt Rapha Rising challenge on Strava which is to do 8800m of climbing in 9 days which happens to coincide with last 9 days of Challenge 1.
- Just for laughs I decided I would try for a 160Km ride to complete my 4th Grand Fondo ride (130+Km), I missed the first 3 in case you are wondering why it's Grand Fondo 7.
So let's tally up where I am on these:
- Today (Thu 17 Jul 2014) is Day 13 of the TDF I've managed to ride everyday... quite a few of the rides have been on the trainer in the kitchen going nowhere fast, but there have been one or two longish rides in between including Hakahana (more about that next) I've managed to clock up 408Km in 20hrs with 3424m of climbing. One morning commute to work was rather cool with max temp of -2C and min of -6C. That of course is way less than what those guys on the tour do but the aim wasn't to match them just to ride every day.
- Depending on how you count it I came 1st, 2nd or 5th ........ LAST on Hakahana, 68.2Km in 6h34m01s okay so I did almost 4Km/20 minutes extra due to missing a sign board and spent another 15 minutes fixing my dérailleur which I bent somewhere along the line, not that 35 minutes would have improved my position much, but considering the climbing and my lack of technical talent I'm satisfied with that, maybe I bit too much off for my first seeded MTB race but hey I finished. Was really happy to see the Cows manning the halfway water point, got really loaded up on the CHOC Bars and encouraging words from fellow CHOC Cows.
- Sooo this one starts on Saturday 19 July and finishes Sunday 27 July, 8800m (28871ft) in 9 days is a fair amount of climbing for someone like me who doesn't like climbing (that's partly why I decided to do it)
For those who want to put that in understandable terms that would be a building of roughly 2200 stories.
For those that know some of the hills around Krugersdorp:- Hekpoort T Junction to top of Sterkies is 657m of climbing,
- Breedts Nek loop car park to car park is 905m,
- Sterkfontein Caves Rd to top of Sterkies 280m,
- Muldersdrift to Key West 277m.
- Mt Everest Base Camp to Summit 3523m. (Okay this isn't in Krugersdorp)
How am I going to manage this feat??? Well I honestly don't know but I'm going to try 3000-4000m each on the 2 weekends i.e. 1500-2000m a day, at worst that will leave me the 5 days of the week to do 2800m which is 2 climbs of Sterkies (underlined above) a day. I haven't worked out what routes would give me 1500 to 2000 yet but I have time constraints as well so need to plan well and just see how the legs last.
I might not make this one it's going to be really difficult for me but if you know how stubborn I can be, you can be sure I will be doing my best. - The way I see it this will happen on one of my 2 Saturday rides of Challenge 3 perhaps a few loops in the cradle and back up one of the 2 hills.
So that's probably (more than) enough rambling words for now... Don't forget I'm still trying to raise R20,000 for CHOC by 94.7 please do mosey on over to my GivenGain project page by CLICKING HERE TO DONATE If you want to know more about this worthy cause, please go read up here on the CHOC website
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