The smell of blue gum leaves under wheel…

…. Is wonderful. Especially when that wheel is a little bmx wheel. I recently discovered that a lovely group of lads has built a pump track out the back of Pioneer Stadium. When I first heard about it I was a trifle apprehensive that it might be a bit full on for and to honest it is.

I took a spin around it this morning and the bumps are big and hard to pump on so there was a lot of pedalling going on. I’m sure for those more experienced in the art of pumping it’s great, but I found it really hard work. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed it, but I certainly didn’t get my flow on today. However I’ve decided this is a good thing. You see this pump track is 5 minutes ride on my BMX from my house. So I have no excuse for not going there most days. In fact I could actually go to work via this pump track (well it’s a little in the opposite direction to work, but only 5 minutes so it doesn’t matter), and get a few laps in before the mindless drudgery.

That means that fact that I struggle with the track is a good thing. Lots of practice on it and hopefully I’ll become a better rider. I’m pretty sure I’ll become a much fitter rider. My legs currently feel like jelly!

Introducing the Duchess

As I mentioned in my last post I sold my Jamis to fund the purchase of a commuter bike. As my health slowly started to improve I really wanted to ride places rather than being trapped in my car, but I wanted something comfy, something I felt relaxed on, something I could take shopping or cruising in the park and something I could wear a dress and heels while riding. And after much searching I found my dream commuter. The 3 speed Linus Dutchie. A HUGE thanks to the wonderful Dave at Velo Ideale (here in Christchurch). Go see him if you want a lovely utility bike!

She's soooo pretty.

She’s a beautiful creature with sleek, flowing lines, leather grips and a 3 speed internal geared hub. When I ride her I feel like a princess! Since I got her I’ve treated her to a few important upgrades. I was lucky enough to win a blogging competition with actual prize money so I was able to get myself a gorgeous Brooks saddle and a detachable wicker basket. I love both greatly. The saddle is so beautiful and so comfortable (despite the dire warnings I received about butt destroying doom) and the basket compliments the bike perfectly. I’ve been taking great pleasure in biking to Mediterranean Foods and picking up yummy treats and a bottle of wine and popping them all in my basket. Then a brief cycle through the disaster zone that is the ever-shrinking central city (well, not through so much as along the edge of) and I’m home with a smile on my face.

Panniers are classy on the outside.....

Biking to work is a joy every day. Although when you’re sitting upright on a bike any head wind is a slight challenge. There has only been one thing I’ve longed for. I’ve got some lovely touring panniers that I use for doing the grocery shopping, but they are big and bulky and I don’t like leaving things in them when I’m in a café or wandering the shops (the few we have left). So I’ve made myself a set of classy shoulder bag style panniers. They fit my laptop and double as a great handbag, unlike my basket which isn’t really ideal as a handbag.

....fun on the inside. Also with handy pockets.

Not bad as a bag.

Making these babies has been a mission and I would never ever recommend that anyone attempt to sew anything more complicated than a table cloth out of oil-skin fabric. Nightmare. Broken needles, bent pins and hours of frustration. The panniers look great, but I’m still not convinced that the effort was worth it. Well, I’ll see when I head to work.

The year that wasn't

I'm almost embarrassed to post here again. It's been over a year! But I'm getting back into biking and for me writing and biking work beautifully together so it's time to start this baby back up. So what's happened in the time that's elapsed since my last post?

Well, no entry for the McLean's 6hr for a start. Not enough money to pay for race entries. And then just over a month after my last post.... EARTHQUAKE! A real one, not just a little rattle, a full on 7.1 shake that threw me out of the bed, knocked down a brick wall in our then back yard and destroyed a lot of property in Christchurch. At the time we all thought this was as bad as it got. We moved house, which was a little stressful as it was very difficult to get insurance.


I started a new job, started volunteering at the awesome charity Dog Watch and started renovating our new hovel. Then in December I got pleurisy, most likely due to the black mold living in our hovel, and all the rubbish I'd been inhaling during the renovation process. Cue a month in bed. Slowly but surely I started feeling better and then the now famous February earthquakes.

These were terrifying, life changing events and nothing has been the same since. We had now water for over a week, but we were very very lucky that our house, friends and family were all fine. Unfortunately the trauma of it all, the sadness at all the lives loss and the sense of upheaval caused by losing the heart of my city caused me to get even sicker. I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I couldn't ride my bike, I could barely walk up the stairs. All I could do was sleep for hours and hours. I'd get light headed, nauseous, breathless, forgetful and on the worst days I incoherent and couldn't even string a sentence together.

It was the most difficult, frustrating time I've even been through. First the earth betrayed me by jumping up and destroying my city, and then my body betrayed me and stopped working. From the 18th of December last year till sometime in June I couldn't do anything. Since June I've carefully be building up my fitness, doing more hours at work and finding myself again. While I was sick I had to give up a lot of things, all biking, my volunteer work, renovating, I had to drop one of my Diploma papers and I pretty much lost myself.



Now I'm coming back. And so's this blog. I've changed my priorities a bit. I've sold my beloved Jamis (insert tears here), to fund the purchase of an absolutely stunning commute bike (more later). I've ordered a Freeload rack with the plan of cycle touring around the South Island and I've realised that I need to slow down a bit.

Tragedy – unexpected breakages

When I got the Anthem one of the first things I did was replace the seat, and not just with any old seat. With a beautiful colour co-ordinated and light Specialized Ariel. I loved this seat. It looked amazing and felt great to ride. Every time I got my bike out of the garage it would greet me and make me smile, inviting me to get on and ride and ride. Then I went for a little superman over my bars onto the road and split my chin open. I thought the damage was solely to my fast healing body, I was wrong. Riding into the bike shop to pick up new, bloodless gloves I noticed a pronounced lean to the right. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, and hoped desperately that my wonderful seat was not stuffed. Alas, it was. Rails terribly bent.

The lovely mechanic at the Hub did his best to straighten them and the seat was rideable. My hopes soared and I headed up the hills for my planned 2.5 hrs. By the top of Rapaki I knew all was not well and had severe pain in places no one ever wants pain. By the time I made it home things were grim and I knew I had to get a new seat. Not good news given my destitute financial state.

There was only one thing for it. Time to sell my possessions! Used my gift for silliness I whipped up an ad for my spare couch and threw it on trademe. In no time I had hundreds of page views and loads of watchers. Unfortunately that didn’t turn into loads of bidders, but I got enough money to cover the cost of a new seat and some race entry fees. Yay.


The lovely Andrew at the Hub tracked me down a new seat (not as fabulous looking as my old seat) and had it ready for me to pick up in time for a ride on the dry tracks at the weekend. My butt (and other regions) were happy again and I spent a rather blusterous 3hrs riding up Kennedy’s (only got blown off three times), up Marleys, down Flying Nun (sketchy in the wind), up to the Traverse and across it (only blown off twice) and then for the first time up Mt Vernon. Mt Vernon was great, expect for the walkers who couldn’t hear me calling over the wind and then informed me that’d like to see me fall off cause that would be funny. I personally didn’t find this very amusing.

The wind took its toll on my and I headed down Rapaki, ruing the fact Old Bownevale wasn’t open and Rapaki was sooooo boring. Luckily I had the wind behind me and the way home and helped my tired legs over the Cashmere Downs. I was completely smashed and happy with it. I’m pretty stoked to be able to do long rides this early in the year. I’ll be sending my entry off to the McLeans 6hr this week. Yay!

Gratuitous self promotion all in the name of racing

My dear generous loyal readers, you are looking gorgeous today. Have you lost weight? Have you been working out, you’re looking buff! You really nailed that last climb. I’ve always been good to you haven’t I? Entertained with embarrassing stories from my life. Well now I need your help. I’ve recently planned out my racing schedule for the rest of the year and it looks good, the only problem is money. You see I’m a poor student now and have zero disposable income (and next to zero non-disposable income), so to finance things like racing I have to be a bit creative. So I’ve entered a competition to win a shiny new phone worth a load of money. I made this extremely embarrassing video.


What I would like you all to do is to go to this website http://forum.vodafone.co.nz/topic/5436-sony-ericsson-xperia-x10-mini-pro-competition/, joined the Vodafone forum (I know this is a pain in the arse) and vote for my video (ahidingplace). I need all the help I can get by 5pm today. Please help me get to races this year!

Coming soon – buy my couch!

Adapting

Initially Aspire has been all about adapting to less for me. Primarily less food, but also to having less energy for a while. I’m pleased to say that this phase of my diet is pretty much complete. I have adapted to having less food and my energy levels have returned to their pre-famine levels. I shouldn’t say famine, because it no longer feels like a famine, all the time, but it certainly did at the start.

To test out just how well my body is coping with the new food regime I decided to put it to the test last week, with a high volume of riding. Obviously I had to do quite a lot of riding and walking on Monday to complete my GE film and even though I was very silly and didn’t take anything at all with me except plain water, I survived that rather well. I had a nice hour of roadie spinning on Tuesday and on Wednesday I decided it was time for the big test. 3hrs on the bike with a muesli bar and a bottle of replace. In the good old days I would have taken a couple of muesli bars, a banana and some lollies with me and some sort of energy gel. I’ve realised that instead of relying on my body’s fitness to get me through long rides I was just eating and eating and eating so my body didn’t even have to try to burn up stored energy. Wednesday’s ride showed me that I don’t have to gorge myself to ride long and hard. It was a fairly full on ride, with a very slippery ascent up Kennedy’s which required a lot more walking than I would have liked because there was just no traction in the wet. Flying Nun was closed so I hoofed it round the road to the start of the Traverse and had fun flying along there. Then it was an icy blast down Rapaki and I headed into town to do an errand (my excuse for getting out for a ride). I felt great till I hit the flat road just after Rapaki. It felt like my legs had fallen off, but after a brief and slightly torturous visit to the Med Supermarket (the wood fired piaaz smells were just evil) I struggled home into the freezing southerly headwind. The last 5kms were pretty sucktastic, but as a test for adapting to less food I felt like my body passed with flying colours.

I had a couple of rest days and then on Saturday hit Kennedy’s with my hubby. Keen to show of my new climbing legs up the road I kept it in the middle ring and smashed my way up the first bit of climbing as fast as I could. Fool. I certainly crested the first rise faster than I ever had before, but I’d pretty much blown my legs doing it. I think it was probably the first time I’ve ever gotten there with my lovely hubby cruising just behind me rather than racing off ahead and circling back to see me so it was worth it. Unfortunately once we got to Kennedy’s track proper it was even wetter than earlier in the week with water flowing in streams across the 4wd tracks so our ride was cut short at the first water reservoir. We daintily negotiated our way back down the mud safely and decided to visit our section and do some skids. Unfortunately my propensity for doing incredibly stupid things on my bike got the better of me and I ended up marking our territory at the entrance of our new street by running my chin across the asphalt after gracefully flying over my bars.


Needless to say there hasn’t been any riding this week as I came away with 3 stitches and a mild concussion. Unfortunately I got rather excited after securing tickets to Metallica on Tuesday and jumped around the living room in celebration and have been blessed with a splitting headache ever since. So a week of perfect weather has been wasted. Sigh. Good news though. I have a new and even more insane goal on the horizon. The incredibly painful sounding Mini Brevet. 300kms, 5800m of vertical ascent in 36hrs around Banks Peninsula. This is going to take some serious training so I’m just putting together a plan at the moment. I’m also planning on doing both the McLeans and Timaru 6hr solos. With my weight loss going so well, I’m now 5kgs down, its time to kick my riding into a new gear. I know I can do it if I put the work in and I can manage to stop falling off my bike.

Mid winter creativity

Hello my lovely readers! I am in a very cheerful moodas I have just finished creating my magnum opus, a short film about Ground Effect's wonderful clothes and just how many items from their catelogue I have. What inspired this burst of film making? Well one of the lovely Ground Effect employees got in touch with me and asked if they could us my stop motion of the jacket and pants packing themselves on their soon to be released youtube site. They also liked this very blog so in the future you may find some of my previous posts gracing the Ground Effect stalkbook page. If you haven't visit that page, go here and 'Like' them. I could waffle on further about the riding I've been doing and how Aspire is still going well, although I am a bit bored of it right now and would like some chocolate, but instead I'll just put my video up. Thanks Ground Effect for making Oarsum clothing that gets me out in all weather.