…..so on a Saturday I generally do my long bike ride which is usually 3-3.5 hours followed by a 20 min run.  Today was to be 3 hours then run 10 minutes fast followed by 10 minutes easy.  I usually average about 30kph for the 3 hours, but today it just wasn’t there!  It felt like I was biking through treacle and no matter how hard I pushed I just couldn’t get there – I put it down to the fact that I didn’t eat that much yesterday (we had a busy day, and food kind of got missed!), so was therefore low on energy.  Anyhow, I promised myself I’d eat properly today and from now on.  As I said earlier, my bike was to be followed by a 10minute fast run, I was debating whether to miss it if I was already feeling a bit bushed!

HOWEVER, after finishing my bike I thought “I’ll just check to see how freely my wheels are running” – the front wheel was not running AT ALL, as soon as I spun it it stopped! I’d just biked the return 45k basically with my brakes on – no wonder it felt hard!  I know exactly what happened – I know they were good at the turnaround point as I checked them – then I went over a pot hole, and as I’d only just put my bike together the day before (I did a practice dis-assembly and bike box pack ready for Aus), I obviously hadn’t clamped the front wheel in properly hence it going out of kilter when I went over the pot hole!

Sooooo….I decided I would start my run and see how I felt – if my legs felt like toast I’d can it!  Anyhow, low and behold I ran my fastest by a long way off a long ride – for those of you that numbers mean something to – I ran 6min 45 second miles for the 10 minutes (that’s a faster pace than my last race!) – so after grinding for an hour and a half with my brakes on I was pretty happy with that!  Having said all of that – I wouldn’t have done it out of choice as I’m now pretty damn pooped!  Easy night tonight me thinks   And of course, the moral of the story is……check your brakes when it’s feeling really hard as it MIGHT not be you!  (Lesley – you’ll relate to this I know – remember when me, you and Steve were cycling just before I flew to Canada?????)

We’ve just been into town to see some of the TransRockies finishers come in.  This is reputed to be the hardest mountain bike race in the world – it’s 7 days of hard mountain biking – and this year, the weather has been awful – yesterday it rained ALL day and these guys are biking up and down some pretty serious stuff!  One of Julie’s friends, Charmaine, was in it so we were trying to catch her finish but no luck!  Never mind!