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A Quick Post From The West

I’ve been having some trouble just lately with my website. It sort of bothers me that I have plans for all kinds of great adventures, but I can’t even seem to keep a website working, but there you go. Maybe it’ll come good soon if I ignore it for a while…


First things first: Cloudride Prologue was great. I had looked at that course ahead of time, and knew that the first 200km and the last 60 or so would be much faster on a gravel bike. Knowing the effort Steve puts into his courses though I suspected that the other part might turn out to be pretty tough. I wasn’t wrong. The country up in the Blue Mountains NP was just beautiful, but boy some of the roads were tough!

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A few random excellent pics around CP1 by someone’s dad (I think)

Pic credits to S. Heiskanen

See how white my gear was at that point!

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Ride For Ryan

When a friend asked me a while ago if I wanted to do an Everest (ride up and down the same hill over and over until you have a total ascent of 8848m – the height of Mt Everest above sea level) my first thought was “not really”. But then he mentioned that it was for a good cause, and the training benefit that it would bring, and that the date had just shifted so that it didn’t clash with what I consider the best one-day race in the country, and I thought again.

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All the way!

Well, I made it! I had a great trip, saw some fantastic things and met some wonderful people. Right now though I’m thoroughly enjoying being ridiculously well looked after by some wonderful friends, old and new, so the stories will have to wait. Shouldn’t be long though!

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WA is big, and wind is horrible!

Right, made it to SA. The wind has not been kind, but it hasn’t been kind to anyone else either. Well needed lunch break right now though. I’m well behind schedule, and the areas giving me issues include:

  • Neck
  • Knee
  • Achilles
  • Posterior

They are all a bit inter-related, and I’m really not sure which is the biggest issue right now, but so far none of them have actually stopped me, so time to get back on the road!

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Day 1

Right, day 1 is pretty much over. Didn’t go perfectly to plan, beginning with knee pain less than an hour in, and then having my light mounting bracket snap a few hours after that, and then realising that the charge cable that has worked perfectly for years and still did last week had chosen today to fail.

There should be a light in this picture…

Happily though the knee seemed to stabilise with a bit of nursing, and I was able the reattach the light with a special high tech engineering solution, known to those of us in the industry as “zip-ties”, and I had another option for charging cables, so with a bit of stuffing around I managed to get 428km in today. I’ve just stopped for dinner and am basically done, I will just roll down the road to find somewhere to sleep.

Coverage is pretty patchy here, so posts might be few and far between!

Rowan

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The tracking link

It’s nearly time! Less than two days and I’ll be heading off. Been enjoying WA in the meantime, but now it is time to move into panicked packing mode! Happily, things are pretty close to ready…

The bit that I like though is looking at the tracking page. A few days ago if you looked at https://indianpacificwheelrace2018.maprogress.com/ you saw a map of the world, because riders were spread everywhere. Check it now though and it is centered tightly around Fremantle. It’s getting exciting!

That is of course the link to follow the ride, so I hope you’ll all check it regularly and come out to wave if I happen to be riding by your house!

 

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LVL Owners Sharing Thread

If you don’t know the background, back in 2016 a product called LVL appeared on Kickstarter. It promised to actively measure hydration levels and give alerts when you needed to drink, amongst other things. I’m a big believer in the benefits of proper hydration, and I think a big part of my quite reasonable result in IPWR was because I drank more than most as we raced our way across the dry plains of Australia. For the sort of non-stop unsupported races that I like to do (as well as a whole host of other uses in health and well-being) this little device offered significant benefits. There was just one problem… Continue reading “LVL Owners Sharing Thread”