I’m a bit late with this update for last Saturdays ride. Suffice to say, it’s not really one I want to dwell on!
Since Christmas I’ve only had a “splattering” of rides as the weeks have gone past, and I certainly haven’t been training consistently by any means! So following a message from Chris, I decided to join him last Saturday morning for a ride over a 52 mile route he had organised. We agreed to meet at 7am, and since it was the first ride outside for a while I was looking forward to it. It was forecast to be cold but dry, however with the cold weather the previous few days of wet weather had not really cleared from the road, so it was wet, sub-zero temperatures and icy frost covered the roads. They say bad things come in threes, so a few miles in the first of the bad things that were going to haunt me that day occurred!
That fall left me with a lot of pain in my left hip and ribs, I didn’t even get a chance to get my hand down and fell with full force onto my left side. It happened so fast I never got a chance to put a hand out even as a natural reaction you would typically expect to a fall. That said, if I had it might have been a collar-bone, and on my left side I’ve done my collar-bone in a few years ago falling off a motor cycle. Still, I managed to get up fairly quickly, a natural reaction to reduce the embarrassment in case there were people around watching me, but at 7.30am in the morning I needn’t have worried!
So on we went, and after about 10 minute or so, I noticed my Power Meter was not communicating with my Garmin head unit. I started fiddling with the head unit, trying to re-pair the until with the hub while on the move, and turning it off and back on again. No Joy! I started thinking that this is going to be expensive to fix! A quick stop to see if I could figure out what was going on, and I noticed I had a buckled rear wheel, presumably done when I fell. Not bad, but enough to make me leave it in to the shop, to get properly “true’d” up (I fancy learning to do that myself actually). At the time of writing its in the shop and will be ready tomorrow for me. With all the messing around I forgot to turn the GPS on and screwed up my ride by missing over 10 miles of the GPS track, recording only 42 of the 52 mile route that day. Hence the reason I have not add my usual embedded Strava map, or Power Stats this time! I’m had to make some manual adjustments to “guesstimate” the numbers based on previous rides.
Part of the route takes us up a steep section of road with a gradient of about 14% or so, as usual Chris pulled ahead and once I got over the top I started to push along to catch him up. A bird decided to fly out of the bushes and went straight into my rear wheel, and a small explosion of feathers left me thinking, he’s had it! I had to clean the feathers off the frame when I got home later! The rest of the ride happened without incident, more or less, except that the last 10 miles or so I totally bonked! I was just empty and had no energy at all. I had to tell Chris to go on and not to wait for me as I was just going to cruise home and would hold him up with my slow pace. Not training consistently for the last month, combined with an early morning (no food) ride, as well as my fall and everything else was all just too much for me!
So, the plan over the next few weeks is to take it easy and build up again with lots of Endurance work, or as much as the weather allows anyway. My rear wheel is away getting “true’d ” up and should be sorted in the next day or so. My Power Meter seems to be working well again, but will need to keep an eye on it. And although I’m still a bit stiff and sore down my left hand side today (Monday), that shouldn’t impede my cycling!
Lets hope that’s the end of the bad luck for 2013!
