I'll start by talking about the my plan. It was fairly simple. Make 20km per hour average while I'm not sleeping and sleep for four hours, twice. It works out to around 70 hours. In the end Michael and I took around 74 hours. Much closer to his plans than mine. We almost certainly would have been a fair bit quicker if I'd been in better form. Michael was certainly finishing stronger than me and more importantly he was ready to get through the checkpoints quicker. As fatigue set in it took me longer and longer to sort myself out at the controls. It wasn't that I wanted to hang about, I just lost my organisation. It's something to learn from for the future if I want to make the most of my ability.
A second thing I want to learn from is that in future I'd only wear the very best knicks on such a long ride. After my first sleep I changed into clean knicks. They were a cheap pair which I've ridden in a lot in the last year including a couple of 400km rides. On this ride they turned into a cheese grater for my sensitive bum. The much better knicks I wore for the first 500 and last 290 did much less damage. I'll keep those cheapies for shorter rides in future. Fortunately Stephen R gave me a handfull of knick cream at Hamilton on the return journey or it would have been much worse. I've never used it before but it really helped to reduce the severity of the rubbing.
The one thing that did work was my plan to not over extend myself by pushing too hard. I was able to curb my enthusiasm enough to not blow my legs out and keep a little in reserve. This was vital if I was going to keep going and make do on only a little sleep.
The thing that really worked for me which I hadn't counted on was the enormous boost to morale I received at every stop. The attitude, humour, encouragement and pure good will from the volleys was amazing. These people had less sleep than us and weren't even getting a great ride, yet they were full of happiness, good food and help. Thanks to every one of you.
...
0 comments:
Post a Comment