The Art of Tapering

All serious athletes will tell you the importance of tapering properly for a big event. With this in mind my tapering regime for today's Wandong Winter Wander was straight forward. Yesterday I cut and split 6 tonne of firewood. That's three loads like the one below. To make it even more stupid, I split it by hand even though we've got an hydraulic splitter. I thought I'd just make a start and next thing I knew it was getting dark and I had a big pile of wood. Oops.


As a result of this genius piece of work, I woke up this morning with incredible pain in my dodgy right shoulder. The one that starts hurting at about 200k on the bike. As a result I rode the whole ride in pain, wishing I could tear my right arm off and toss it away. The secondary problem caused by cutting wood is that I invariably breath in a fair amount of sawdust which gets trapped in my nose and throat. My immune system then works overtime creating mucus and god knows what else to help expel the foreign matter. Suffice to day I felt like crap.

Don't do this before a big ride. It's only going to hurt. Full ride report tomorrow.