I’ve been home for over a month now and it’s been fantastic. Sure I love the life of a cyclist in Europe but gees, my quiet life back home in Australia is very nice. Spring in Canberra is a lovely season, if you escape the bombing magpies, viscious winds and the 6am morning rides. For the first three weeks back, I enjoyed frequent cafe time, unstructured exercise and generally just chilling out with friends and family I hadn’t seen for 7 months. I could sure get used to that. I headed back to work very part time as a soft tissue therapist and enjoyed working my brain cells again.
After this 3 week break, it was straight back into training. Well, I skipped the training part and threw myself into the Honda Hybrid Tour for Women. Quite a mouthful but a fantastic tour to get women’s racing really up and going in Australia. With 80-odd girls in this very first year, it will hopefully just continue to get bigger and better. Whilst the stages were very short, the pace was high and the competition strong and it was great to see the local girls riding aggressively and giving us a real challenge. It certainly kick started my return to training and by the end of 3 days, I was no longer feeling very fresh in the legs.
The following weekend I headed to Sydney for a conference and Dave and I managed some training early in the mornings at the crack of dawn. We were woken every morning by the clip-clop of horses at the Randwick race course, so it made sense to get up and train. With Sydney’s traffic and road system, cycling can be a real nightmare unless you travel as a group and with cyclists familiar with routes. Our friend Hamish took us to a quiet block at Doll Point for some sprints and intervals. To get there was fortunately off road via a maze of bike paths. Our return was via traffic and together with pushy motorists left me in a bad mood.
The next day we set out to find the 6.30am infamous Coluzzi bunch. Problem was we arrived at 6.29am and they’d already left! So Dave and I set out on a 2 hour negotation of the busiest roads and highways towards Cronulla. Again not an awesome day on the bike. Sunday did make up for it with a 4 hour round trip to Waterfall in the Royal National Park- a common location for Sydney cyclists on the weekends. It was a really pleasant escape from the traffic and had plenty of hills of various gradients.
This past week of training has seen a return to speed training with crit racing,motopacing and a local club road race today. I’m feeling like I’ve put in some solid training this week and there is no rest until Monday, with another long ride planned for Sunday. All this is in preparation for Oceania championships on November 13th-15th in New Zealand. It is going to be difficult to be in supreme condition this early- I can but do my best. The day after the road race, I’m looking forward to a 10 day holiday on the South Island with Dave. A bit of R and R before training gains momentum for Nationals in January.
Bye,
Vicki