Who said I could walk?

After my initial enthusiasm to be back on the bike, the resultant achy sore elbow convinced me that maybe I shouldn’t be getting so excited and riding 3 days in a row just yet. However with my appointment with the surgeons at the hospital on Monday and my physio giving me some weight lifting exercises (no I’m not learning the Clean and Jerk) I decided this morning would be a good morning to commute by bicycle again. It hurt my elbow less and the rest of me slightly less than last time so maybe there’s hope for doing the recreational race at Mt Somers on the 19th of April after all. I’ve sensibly realised that barring an intervention by supernatural powers I just won’t be up to the sport race. 20 fairly flat kilometres should be doable with a month of preparation.

In the meantime I’ve been doing more swimming and my hubby and I headed over to the West Coast for the weekend to do a bit of walking about in the bush. We had fantastic weather and did some lovely walks, and I discovered that the muscles you use for biking are not the same as the ones you use for walking and that my walking muscles didn’t know what hit them. I was hobbling round like an old woman on Saturday night! Luckily a couple of Monteiths sorted me out nicely.

We did a really gorgeous 3 hour return walk up the Pororari River, spotted some birds and stick insects, threw stones in the river, and generally had a lovely time. That night we got eaten alive by sandflies watching the sun set at the beach a couple of minutes walk from the bach we were staying in. Little buggers. It wasn’t until we got back to Christchurch that I felt the full force of their itchy menace.

Being on the Coast was very inspiring and I have a number of poems brewing away in the back of my mind, including one about the fantastic wekas that frequented our accommodation, cheeky sods. Much amusement was had from watching them sneak into the house and chase each other round outside. Silly chickens.

The second day we stopped in Arthurs Pass and did more walking, which once more left me crippled. Ahhhh, the staggering around after another 2 ½ hours of walking, so amusing to my unsympathetic husband. I did enjoy being in the bush though and despite the sandflies I’m really keen to head back over for more exploring. However this might not be such an easy thing to do in the future as I’ve made the big decision to commit to doing the Alpine Epic. I’ve lined myself up a coach, the lovely Andrew from Hub Cycles, my local bike shop. Now I just need to be able to ride for more than 30 minutes without feeling sick or my arm wanting to fall off and I’ll be away. It’s going to be quite a challenge, but I’m looking forward to really seeing how far and hard I can push myself.

PS: I'll put up a few photos from the trip at the weekend

I can walk places?!!

As anyone who read my last post knows this whole healing thing has been taking a wee bit of a toll. I’ve gotten to the point where enough’s enough and decided to try and sort my mental state out (that’s why I’m sitting at the home computer at 10.45am on a Monday in my pjs). I’ve booked myself some extra sleep ins and my lovely husband and I treated ourselves to the first relaxing, do-anything-we-want weekend in forever.

I won’t blather on about Saturday, except to note we went to Scorpio books and I picked up a New Zealand poetry anthology. *wonders how many of my 3 readers I’m about to lose when I start going on about poetry instead of mountain bikes?*

I’ve been writing poetry on and off since I was 7 and won a poetry contest run by the local radio station in Cromwell. It has been a very long time since I really sat down and wrote poetry, about 2 years I guess. Reading these beautiful, strange, funny and clever poems in my new book has woken stuff up in me and I want to write again. So I’m warning you, this blog will have some poems in it, which is weird for me. I’ve never really shown them to anyone.

Back to the matter at hand. So yesterday hubby and I decided it was time to get out and enjoy the country again. I was amazed to discover that I could get almost the same amount of enjoyment from walking in the bush as riding my bike. We headed out for a very easy walk, as I’m still fighting off a cold, and ended up at Glentui. It was amazing and a bit freaky when we got out of the car. The whole area was humming with bees and wasps, it was crazy. I’m allergic to bees and while in small numbers they don’t worry me at all, when there’s lots around I feel a bit freaked. So this mountain of buzzing was a bit worrying. We had a picnic lunch in the sun and then headed into the bush. The wasps were everywhere, thousands and thousands of them, but all very passive and out of it on nectar.

The forest was gorgeous, however I felt sad there weren’t more birds around. There were a huge amount of rat and stoat traps so I guess that explains it. The whole walk I only saw a couple of bellbirds, 3 fantails and a couple of goldfinches, all birds I can see in my backyard! Damn predators. My lovely husband was a paragon of patience as I was stopping every few minutes to look at a tree, take a photo of lichen, or at the top of wee hills get my breath back. So what should have been an easy one hour walk was actually a very relaxed 2 hour walk, yay! My walk in the bush left me wanting more, so hopefully we can try something a bit bigger next weekend with a few more people (I promise to not to stop every 5 minutes).

And (nervously), here’s that poem…

Glentui Wasps

Forest thrums, whirrs

Electric song, tinnitus hum,

Black and gold army feasts.

Sooty growth

sustaining

Like drunks they stumble

across the path

Their fate at my feet.

Lichen flower

Fungus petals

Dead beauty

worm waste,

Anger dulled, blasé

they fly through me.

Where is the bird song in this throbbing machine?