Since the rained out Audax 300 km ride on which I did 220+km before throwing in, err, fetching a towel, work has again heated up and my time on two wheels has been compromised.

I did manage to get my bike over to Sydney on a work trip and did one short ride while I was there. What with the timezone change and a Sydney winter, I overslept on ride morning and didn’t manage to join the Sydney Cycling Club on their usual ride. I did meet my friend Ming (who is a proud TTC donor and father of an autistic boy) and we rode a nippy 32 km, both temperature and speed. Sydney’s roads are not fun after Singapore and Malaysia — potholes galore! Ride map and stats here.

On that same trip, I was supposed to meet a couple of friends a scant 10 km from my hotel. After finding out that this little jaunt would cost me AUD 80 by taxi (!), I decided that I’d just ride there. Worked well except that the temperature was 7 or 8 degrees and my back light froze! Was also quite interesting cycling back to my hotel at half-past midnight. The roads were completely deserted except for one sleepy taxi driver who gazed at me like I was from outer space

On Saturday, I was supposed to meet Chris for his 124 km ride, except I overslept (do you notice a pattern here??). So met him halfway and did 69 km. Ride map and stats here.

That evening was our fund-raiser party, which Chris has already written about, I see. Take a look also at this page that our guest caricaturist for the night has put up. If anyone’s interested, she also does caricatures remotely using photographs.

Next long ride is the Audax 200 km on Saturday the 11th. Chris has done a LOT of miles leading up to the TTC. I, on the other hand, seem to have, er, “saved” myself.

Mileage and intensity will increasingly become priorities for me. On Saturday, I did a 123 km ride, which was technically three consecutive rides. At 5.30 am was the 40km Joyriders Mandai loop, a short warm-up to the main event of the day. I was impatient to increase the intensity but I also wanted to chat with fellow riders who were taking it easy. So I (foolishly!) shifted to the big chain ring and smallest cog for about half the ride, even up slopes. Particularly foolish given that I’d only had 4 hours of sleep. My cadence stayed in the 40s and 50s throughout, storing up retribution for the rest of the day.

The next ride was the usual Joyriders Big Day Out, with a vast number of riders (a hundred? two hundred?) heading to East Coast Park by way of Punggol and Changi. Because of my foolishness with the gearing earlier, I wasn’t ready for any heroics. Fortunately, none were truly necessary as the little group I was part of (with Chris) maintained a reasonable pace. This ride ends with a meal stop at a food court that, amazingly, only has two drinks stalls open at 9 in the morning. Amazing because a hundred cyclists spend an hour there every Saturday. If more stall owners opened earlier, they’d mint money.

Chris had told me he would do a Kranji loop after this and I joined him for a short part of the way along with Charlie. He continued on after we dropped off. I wasn’t looking forward to the next day’s ride!

123 km
29 km/h avg
Click here for a GPS map overlaid with a Google map plus charts and things. The resolution could be better but it’ll do.

Sunday’s ride was meant to be Audax-style ie no surging, ending average of 28 km/h at the most and no dropping anyone. After Saturday’s ride, the legs were heavy and the heart just refused to wake up and knock itself into the aerobic zone. Extremely unusual for me, as my HR tends to be around the 100-110 mark when I step out my front door and averages about 160-165 for a standard ride.

I finally woke up after a couple of hours of spinning. Surprisingly, although I was hurting from the previous day’s antics, this was just soreness not loss of power. I decided to go steady but keep the pressure on. My speedo has been acting up for the past few days so I didn’t exactly know how fast we were going. It did seem faster than the usual Audax ride and I received the occasional protest while pulling (Lack of a speedo is a great excuse!)

We stopped at Changi Village for a quick water and icecream break, and about an hour later, I stopped to get a large packet of fries (chips!) at Carl’s Junior. Good move as it turned out because the salt must have helped keep the ever-present threat of cramps away. No one wanted to wait for me to finish the fries so I stuck them in my back pocket and popped one in every so often, much to my fellow-riders’ amusement. I’m sure there’s a photo somewhere. Good thing too as the regular intake kept the carbo level nice and steady. Along the way, Peter kept producing one outrageous idea after another for our planned TTC fund-raiser in Singapore.

At the last 3 km or so, I threw down the gauntlet and took off on the traditional ending sprint along Bukit Timah, spurred on by the prospect of a frozen margarita at the end of it all. Yes, a change from the conventional beer. No-one followed and you’ll see from the link below that I didn’t bother keeping up the pace after a while (actually I couldn’t!). But stupidly, instead of being the first to arrive, I ended up being the last. Took a wrong turn, climbed what looked like a >25% incline and back down again, and stopped to ask someone where the heck I was. Good thing the ’speed bump’ was only one or two hundred metres long!

Recovery spin planned for tonight.

142 km
29 km/h avg
GPS data

Because it’s there! pat comes the answer.

Sort of but not quite.

I wanted to prove to myself that I was up for the Twin Towns Challenge.

I wanted to achieve a new personal best distance (previous best: 320-ish km)

I wanted to get to a new milestone on my 29th.

And finally–Andrew had advised me that I wasn’t up to 400 km just yet and I wanted to prove him wrong!

Of course, I wasn’t taking this lightly at all. The previous weekend, I joined an Audax-like 200 km ride and followed that up with a solo 100 km a couple of days later. Drank like a fish all week (water!). Ate like a maniac the day immediately before. Ensured that my bike was in good condition. All the boxes ticked, in other words.

On the ride, more of the same. Ate frequently, dunked bottles of icy water over my head at every opportunity (and performed the shimmy-shammy though no one would insert dollar notes into my waist band, to my utter disgust), whizzed down slopes so I could tackle the coming up-slope more easily, blah blah.

Then–dread, disaster, disappointment. None of my making.

Going into a long right-turning bend on the way from Kulai to Johor Bahru, an oncoming car came out the bend out of the blue (out of the blue bend?) at a fantastically misjudged speed. The driver must have been doing 90 around a bend that should have been taken at 50. Just when he came into view, I saw him over-steer and skid off the road onto his left. Oops, he says to himself, there’s a ditch here and I’m headed right into it, so let’s steer the other way. The car jerked itself wildly to the right and this time he was skidding sideways across the road to where I was. Heading straight at me, in other words, side on, with no control over his auto any more. Think drifting but without the control and at 90 km/h.

All this within the matter of a second or two.

When I first saw the car skid off the road to the shoulder, it struck me that it was very like a video game. Now that it was headed towards me, all the more so. Funny but true!

All those things about one’s life flashing before one’s eyes? I didn’t have time for all that. I knew it was binary: either lights out or complete escape. No in-betweens and no “Sorry, you lose 1 life, you have 2 lives remaining” video game message.

From the angle at which the car was headed my way (sided my way? haha), I thought perhaps, just perhaps, I could squeeze past if I accelerated quickly enough. After 280 km on the bike, acceleration isn’t necessarily the thing one’s legs are best suited for and I must have managed half a turn of the pedals. It was enough. The car caught my rear wheel and careened further towards poor Denise, who was about 30-40 metres behind me. I immediately crashed, of course, but managed to fall neatly, receiving not even a scratch.

I immediately turned around and it looked like Denise was getting up off the ground and her bike was lying a little distance from her.

What had happened was that, as with me, the car was headed for a side-on collision with her. Like me, it was do or die for her but unlike me, she didn’t have the choice to accelerate to avoid the car. She managed to disengage her shoes from the bike just in time to jump off to the right and feel her steed pulled from underneath her by the impact with the vehicle.

All’s well that ends well. Mostly. Both riders are well, Denise with a bruise or two from landing on the road. It was a hugely disappointing ending for me to a 400 km milestone that seemed well within reach. There will be another time. Denise told me, incredibly, that it was only the second ride she’s ever had to give up for any reason–and this is someone who’s done 600 km, 800 km and 1,200 km rides!

We later marvelled at the fact that the peleton had chosen to break up just for this short section of the ride just a meagre few minutes prior to the crash. If we’d been in our original formation, this would have been a very different report indeed–assuming there had been a report.

Another ride report here.

And ride stats for what they’re worth:
Distance: 280-ish km
Average: 28 km/h
Max: 61 km/h (one of those down slopes, in top gear, pedalling like a hamster)
Time on bike: 9 and a half hours-ish

Saturday was the first long ride since the bus fodder ride last summer and what was supposed to be an hour turned into almost Three (just as well i had done some training) it was great to be out again though and i am looking forward to this weeks training, Jamie might even get his bike out of the bag!!!!.

PS:

As Jon reminded me on Saturday “Pain Is Temporary, Quiting Is Forever “

PDA

A local Cycling Team are running a sportif event on Sunday Feb 1^st in support of the Geoff Thomas Foundation for people with leukaemia (more details below). This is a non competitive, timed cycling event over a distance of approximately 120 kilometres (about 70 miles) starting and finishing at Cranfield University, This is not a race and is really as hard as you want to make it. The course is very scenic, taking in a lot of Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire countryside and looks to be a well organised event.

Link to the website with all the details of the event including Grant and Graeme (the organisers) contact details and a link to the Geoff Thomas Foundation website  

http://www.cycleweb.co.uk/synergy/reg.tov.shtml#top

Text from Jon today regarding a ride at short notice but I could not manage it (all warm gear in the washing machine – I have not used that one before)

So this is it later this year we are off on a major challange so the miles and effort have to step up – watch this space – 3 hour ride tomorrow morning. Brrrr

Father and Son Christmas day ride

As it is Christmas I decided that I would treat myself to a new bike. After an enjoyable period of drooling over various web sites, making a nuisance of myself in bike shops and intensive interrogation of fellow cyclists, I splashed the cash on a BMC SLC Pro.  Fully loaded, the bike weighs an impressive 7.1kg – the comments that I received at home about losing 10kg from my belly and saving an awful lot of money were only to be expected!

I also bought myself a Polar heart rate monitor to help track my training progress and bore everyone stupid with too much detail!

It’s winter in Singapore now which means an average temperature of 32 degrees each day rather than 34 degrees so there are plenty of opportunities for biking – unlike the possibilities for my poor buddies in the freezing UK.

As I belong to two cycling clubs here – Joyriders and ANZA (Australia & New Zealand Association Cycling), there are daily rides organised – all I have to do is turn up and ride!  Unfortunately, due to the heat and in order to avoid the rush hour traffic (and to get to work on time), the rides are either at 5am or 6am during the week but with the luxury of a lie in at the weekend when the rides start at 7am. As I live 14km away from the rendezvous point I have a 30 minute warm up just to get there!

Cycling here is very different from the UK, hot and humid, with some runs through areas of jungle where it is common to see wild monkeys and flocks of green parrots.  It still makes me laugh when the peleton call is exaggerated monkey noises in order to alert the group to the little critters.

Many of the rides are flat as there are few hills and certainly no mountains here in Singapore.  The Singapore version of Alpe D’Huez is South Buena Vista (SBV) Hill which winds upwards for about 2km and the tropical equivalent of Galibier is Mount Faber which is steeper but shorter at around 600m (circuits required).  The steepest that I have found is Kent Ridge – our version of Mt Ventoux – short but steep – I’m guessing 400m at 10%. 

Each week I will detail my rides, not because I want to bore everyone but because this will help me track my own progress and give me the incentive to train as much as possible for our European Challenge!

On holiday from work until Jan 5th so loads of biking while I had the chance.

Date                       Ride                                           Dist     Time   Avg Speed

Sat 20^th Dec 08        Joyriders Changi Loop                   87km   3hrs      29kmh

Sun 21^st Dec 08        Joyriders Kranji breakfast ride         76km   2.52hrs  27kmh

Mon 22^nd Dec 08       Jurong Loop, Kent Ridge, SBV         33km   1.16hrs  26kmh

Tue 23^rd Dec 08        Joyriders Sprints                          70km   2.27hrs  28kmh

Thur 25^th Dec           Joyriders Christmas ride                 78km   2.58hrs  27kmh

Fri 26^th Dec 08          ANZA city loop                            38km   1.20hrs  28kmh

Sat 27^th Dec 08        ANZA Kranji                                 78km   2.40hrs  29kmh

Sun 28^th Dec 08        Joyriders Kranji                            70km   2.27hrs  28kmh

Tue 30^th Dec 08        Joyriders Sprints                          68km   2.23hrs  29kmh

Wed 31^st Dec 08       Joyriders Wed ride                        51km   1.52hrs  27kmh        

 Happy New Year everyone – looking forward to some great biking in 2009!!