where: North Rd ride. Wednesday, 5.45am bunch.
weather: 6 degrees celsius, dry.
distance: 52km
avg speed: 29km/h
ride time: 1h 48min
avg HR: 134 bpm
max HR: 176 bpm

Finally, I managed to drag myself out for a NRR, after promising myself I’d do it for the past several weeks now. Admittedly, it seems like it’s been raining everyday for the past month. I’m not keen on wet weather riding.

Bastian awoke at 3.45am for a feed. By the time I’d put him to bed, it was 4.15am, almost perfect timing to get set up for a NRR ride, so there was no excuse today.

Rolled up to the meeting point at 5.35am. About 30 riders in total. Heading down to Mordi was pretty cruisy. Felt like I was coasting half the time. I stayed to the back of the pack though, since I was a rookie and didn’t want to offend anybody. (also I’m still a bit nervous with big bunch riding). I discovered today that being right at the back, even though it’s a cruisy pace, you still have to work a bit hard. You’re prone to all the decelerations and accelerations. Plus, you’re always having to work to catch the main bunch after a traffic-light split. Because I don’t bunch ride often, I still don’t like to follow the wheel in front too closely. This means I’m wasting a lot of energy braking and then accelerating again. I need to work on that.

After the Mordi roundabout, the pace picked up a little. About mid to high 30s, into a headwind. Keeping up wasn’t too hard. My main problem was not keeping up when taking off after traffic lights. Although the pace was medium, the bunch actually accelerates very fast to get to that target cruising speed. So, if I wasn’t paying attention, in the blink of an eye, it seemed as though the bunch had a good 20-30m gap on me. I spent a lot of the return leg, wasting energy, having to bridge this gap, several times. No traffic stops in the last few kms, so I managed to stay with the bunch until North Rd, where I departed. I’m not sure what the avg speed was, since I always wreck my average by riding very lazily coming home from Beach Rd.

I’m still feeling pretty good this morning. However, this WAS the slow, 5.45am bunch. Judging by today’s effort; even for a relatively “easy” pace, I still had to work fairly hard. I definitely do not feel ready for the 6am hardcore bunch. I’ll get dropped in no time.

Note to self – things to improve on:

1. FITNESS
2. spooling up to target speed faster (and clipping-in faster)
3. following the wheel in front

Following up from last Sunday’s ride, we decided to hit Donna again, this time with Sandy and Andrew L. Matt and Andrew N. were supposed to join us for the 8am start from Launching Place but they decided to to head out later.

The ride started out a little wet, which would be very bad later on with the wind and cold air near the top. The first hour was reasonably easy but the gradient started going up and up, particularly after we reached the turn off from Don Road to Donna Buang Road. There was a lot less snow this week with the slightly warmer temperatures the last few days and bit of rain. Even so, everyone was suffering – toes and fingers were hurting as much as legs and lungs.

Strangest sight of the day was the igloo in the middle of the road just before reach Donna Buang Summit Road. I tried to take some pictures of it but the camera batteries weren’t too happy in the cold. Sandy hadn’t stopped with us at the igloo so we quickly got moving again to catch up. We all met up again at the 10 mile carpark, as Sandy was coming back down to report that we couldn’t get to the top because of ice on the road. I took that as a good excuse to wait there while HYG went up to have a look for himself, as my knee was getting pretty sore.

Andrew was really suffering in the cold so those of us who had dry clothes to change into got changed while Andrew and I headed off for the 20 minute 16km descent. What a blast! At the bottom in Warburton, Andrew couldn’t wait around for the other two so we started the ride back to Launching Place via the Warby Rail Trail. Not sure how you can get separated from someone on a trail with no turns, but somehow I managed to get separated from Andrew. I eventually met up with the other two as they came through Millgrove but with my aching knee, I slowly started falling behind them too. In the end, we all made it back to the cars. What a relief! Dry clothes and some food and we were happy.

I’m pooped.

More detailed write-up at wurple.net

Two things I need to buy and I know you guys can either source a good price for me or provide recommendations on what to buy.

1) A set of ear phones with a 2.5mm jack (I’m sick of my standard O2 Atom ones falling out all the time).

2) A digital camcorder, in the $800 price range, as I want to buy one for my parents.

Unbelievable. Can’t find a picture of Tommy Dysart as the butcher saying, “Is Don. Is good.”

I think we’ll have to amend the rules for rides to qualify as YPRs to include any significant rides, not just those with 3 or more of us. Otherwise we’ll never add to the list.

Anyway, it was just HYG and me yesterday for the ride up Mount Donna Buang. I haven’t been doing a lot of riding, let alone much road riding up mountains, so it was a bit of a grind for me. The ride up ended up being split into two sections with a five minute break in the middle – one from Warby to the turn-off to Narbething by Acheron Way, and from there to the top of the mountain as far as we would go. I did have to stop for a few seconds near the end of each section because my legs just couldn’t take the grinding anymore.

More of a write-up here.

On the weekend, I did a bit my usual groceries down at Victoria Street. I grabbed some extra snacks in preparation for some late nights watching the Tour de France. There’s a great range of stuff to try in an Asian supermarket so you never really know what you’re going to find.

I came across the wasabi green peas and spent a good couple of minutes having look at all of the options. The last lot I bought were not too bad, but more sweet than hot. In the end, I settled on these Khao Shong wasabi-coated green peas from Thailand. They have just the right mix of up-your-nose wasabi and salty flavour. Great stuff – this large 280g can isn’t going to last more than a week. They also had wasabi-coated broad beans but these only came in the smaller can – will have to see if I can find these in the larger can. At least these peas are only 10% fat compared to 30% in your usual potato chips.

Another interesting snack I bought was some mixed dried fruit chips. I didn’t really like the taro, but everything else in the mix is quite good, especially the jackfruit.

Throw me your recommendations for other snacks to try.