Nancy Gets Naked

This week I've stripped Nancy down, taken off her guards, adjusted her brakes and gears and packed all her bearings with lovely new waterproof teflon grease. She's feeling better and so am I. The accumulated gunk of the winter is gone and everything running well. All I need now is to save up enough to replace her terribly worn (17,000km) drive train. It's so bad that I need to do chain rings and all. This is the third set of chain and cassette for these rings, so they've done better than 40,000km.


Today I finally had a good ride. I did my number one 45k training loop and totally nailed it. It's a hilly route and I rarely break 30kph for it. Today's conditions weren't ideal with a blustery north wind and fairly warm conditions. This meant I was into the wind on the highway, out in the open where I can normally make up some time and got the tailwind for the section where the road is well protected by trees. Somehow I still managed to average better than 32kph. This is by far the best ride I've done in 3 months and hopefully I can keep on an upward sweep. I managed an average heart rate of 161 for the loop which means I was kicking into it pretty hard.

I'm finding at the moment that I need two easy days between each hard workout. Normally I can manage a hard ride every second day. Hopefully adjusting to this schedule for a while is going to let me get over the cold and get back to some kind of form. Here's hoping.

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