Sunday, December 19, 2010

Winter training wonderland

We've had quite a bit of snow recently, which made bike riding conditions "challenging" to say the least.

This is how the approach to the top of Box Hill looked like this morning:



And this is the famous 20 minutes queue for the coffee atop:




The coffee and cake tasted so much better today...



Looking forward to some sunshine now.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Helly Hansen Adventure Race

It was such good fun to break up the winter training by doing an event that was "different". And it was different in every way...

It was a team event and we had 2 teams and decided to dress up for the occasion:

I was off in a team with Neil and Chris. The event was in a format of a Run, Bike, Canoe, Bike, Run. The weather was perfect and we decided to take it out hard, while still having a good time:

The Canoe portion admittedly wasn't our strongest discipline:

But we rode our bikes hard and made up time on the mountain bike section despite some "wardrobe malfunctions":

In the end we finished in 13th place out of over 100 teams. We all had great support along the course and at the finish by Alex taking pictures. The event was great fun and we laughed throughout the whole event and for hours afterwards.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Winter Training





The winter wonderland has descended upon us making training conditions "challenging"

Upon returning from Mexico I started my winter preparation for next season, concentrating mainly on cycling. In the first week after we got back I had my first "lab test". Needless to say I didn't break any records and the results were fairly disappointing.

Since then things have been getting better and my fitness is slowly improving, but it will be a long winter and it's a slow improvement process.

That's how I'm spending quite a lot of my time at the moment:




Last weekend was the end of my first 3 week block of training and on Saturday I broke my record at enduring the Chinese torture of turbo training by sitting for 3 hours and 10 minutes on the damn thing. That's my reward afterwards:


Otherwise not much to report, other than looking forward to the Christmas break now.