I can ride my bike!

Yes, that’s right. I’ve been for an actual ride, on my actual bike, outside!!! It was a beautiful sunny day today and when I got up there was no resisting the lure of my squishy bike. Also my physio made a very surprising off-hand comment along the lines of why are you not riding your bike yet? Aha!!

Being a very sensible lass, despite evidence in this very blog to the contrary, I decided to ride on the road on my squishy bike and make it a relatively short, easy ride. It has been 69 (tee hee) days since I last rode my bike outside after all. I got off to a wobbly start and one thing was immediately apparent. I need to relearn how to position myself on my bike. My left arm straightens and my right arm doesn’t. This means that initially I actually found myself pulling to the left. I quickly adjusted my left arm to match my gammy right arm. This was good, my new position is actually a much better riding position. The problem is that my left side doesn’t know that yet and so after cruising along for a while I’d find myself all lopsided again. This meant that while my elbow was pretty much fine with the whole ride, my right wrist and shoulder, which were trying and failing to compensate for my bendy arm, were pretty sore.

I know you are all dying to know how much fitness you lose after 69 days of pretty much no exercise. Well, the answer is all of it, and then some. My blog is almost exactly a year old so now would be a good time to recap. My goals were:
1. Lose 10kgs by November 2008
2. Complete the Molesworth Muster in 2008
3. Lose 15kgs in a year
4. Be competitive in the Sherwood Enduro 30km race and the Mt Somers race
Goal number 1: Fail!
Goal number 2: Succeed!
Goal number3: Comprehensively fail
Goal number 4: Ahahahahaha!

I did manage to lose about 6 kgs during 2008 and I am very proud of completing the Muster, but since breaking my elbow all hopes of being competitive, or even competing in races for the next few months has gone out the window. I went for a 14km ride on the road on my squishy mountain bike and it just about killed me. Mainly because I went out and attacked the little rollers like I’ve been riding every day like I used to. I felt very sick after about 7kms and decided that maybe just maybe I’d gone a bit too hard, but also that stopping near a piggery is not a good idea.

So I’m thinking it could be a bit more of a mission than I initially thought to complete the Mt Somers race on the 19th of April. In fact I’ll have to see how commuting goes next week because 14kms on the road isn’t very far. Don’t get me wrong though, I am SO HAPPY to be riding again. Driving to work and back every day has been horrible. I hate driving to work, even in bad weather. I’ve been getting a little bit of a jealousy thing going on when I stop at the lights and 5 or 6 happy carefree cyclists pull up beside me, enjoying the summer sun and the ever present close-call adrenalin. No more car for me now and hopefully in a couple of weeks my arm will be up to the road bike too. So stay tuned for future goals, there might be some biggies!