Day 35

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Today was the long ride day. This had been on the training calendar all week and, despite my vague thoughts about doing it yesterday, it was always going to be a real ask, to be able to cycle for 5 hours. The issue here is that you need to think of the terrain around here as either up hill or down hill, flat, as a concept, doesn’t really exist in a volcanic region. Also, you need to consider that, depending on how the wind may or may not be blowing, you can be flying up hills relatively easily, or pedaling hard just to get down a hill. To put into perspective. Previous rides have seen cycling to Stratford take an hour, and cycling back take 30 minutes, and yet the next ride it was 45 mins in each direction, so, heading out for a 5 hour out and back ride is really hard to try and judge, as 2.5 hours and then 2.5 hours back again may simply not work. As it was, there was a really strong cross wind on the ride today, so it didn’t seem to matter which direction I was cycling in, I was cycling into a head wind!

The plan was to finally make it to Hawera, which is basically the coast the other end of the 3 from New Plymouth. Its 55km from Inglewood, so it was going to be an ‘over train’ in terms of the half, and a decent effort towards an Iron distance race. With a 5:30 and a 6:00 ride due the next couple of weekends, race excepted, its going to be a lot of riding coming up, and, as the last ride had finished an hour shorter than planned, this was a key session to see how I was getting on. As it turns out, the ride itself went pretty well, I decided to just head to Hawera and back, and see how I was doing time wise, and make up any extra time at the end of the ride around Inglewood. I got to Hawera in just over 2 hours, which I was quite pleased with, and it wasn’t until I turned around that I found the headwind was worse on the way back, so what would normally be the easier route to travel, up the map, became the hardest by quite some way. It had clouded over, and was actually pretty cool in the wind when the sun was in, and, even when the sun was out, the shadows cast by the hedgerows and trees were long as it was getting quite late. I got back into Inglewood and had another 30 minutes to make up, but heading up the 3 was just too much with the headwind, so I turned around, and did a few laps in town before worrying that I wasn’t going to have enough energy in the legs to make the last climb home, so I headed up with the intention of heading past home to make up the last few miles to make me to 70 miles for the ride, which would be around 5 hours. I was, therefore, around a mile past home, and at the bottom of a very steep hill when I turned for home and, before I had gone about 10 yards, there was an almighty ‘ting’ from the rear wheel and the bike started to lurch quite violently, and I knew straight away that I’d just broken a spoke! Nightmare. I found that I was able to pedal the bike still and, as I was just a mile from home and didn’t fancy the walk in my cycle shoes, I pedaled on and headed home with a total of 4 hours 53 of riding, and 70.25 miles on the clock. I couldn’t reasonably do any more on the bike with the wheel as it was, and I knew I’d be looking at having to get the wheel re-spoked, and quickly, before we headed to Taupo. I got back, stretched as best I could as my right thigh was really sore, and rested up for the rest of the evening.

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