Liz Randall's Cycling Blog - a life behind bars

"With ordinary talents and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable"



Saturday 27 October 2007

R&R and One Hour Update


Back home again after a whistle stop tour of the Red Centre of Aus..Uluru, Kings Canyon and Alice Springs were where my beds were and along the way I visited Kata Tjuta,Uluru and did the rim walk of Kings Canyon.

And after a series of days when I had to get up early to see the sunrise over each of those, this morning I agitatedly woke up knowing I had to see the sunrise over....!?Croydon??!! Reminds me of a coupla years ago on returning home after a long holiday, waking up in my own bed and not having a clue where I was....scary and perhaps a hint of what Alzheimer's dementia might feel like.





My knees held up well, despite the somewhat cramped space in the bus (and I'm a shorty) and the seemingly endless steps, but my hips are still protesting that I did too much climbing and descending.

I am now sporting a mini sun tan and proud of it. The weather was very kind..nice and warm and not the exhausting heat I'd expected. On our first night we were lucky enough to witness a rare and spectacular thunderstorm over Uluru, with horizontal as well as vertical lightening. So no jaw dropping sunset views, but something even better something much less witnessed. The next day the air was as clean as it could be..real genuine fresh air...brilliant.

We saw a coupla lizards, kangaroos and camels, galahs, parrots and many raptors

..no snakes thankfully.

Back home then and its time to re-evaluate my position WRT to my Hour Record attempt.

The situation is this: I'm not as fit as I should be. The wheels fell of the bus during July-early September when I was doing 2 jobs and August-mid September when I was in the thrall of BPPV. The result is that instead of gaining strength/fitness I have actually lost it which is well and truly demonstrated by my Performance Management chart in Cyclingpeaks. Whether my current fitness is enough to take me through to a result I can be happy with is the question.

Sooooo. On Tuesday I will do the first of a couple of tests on the track and in conjunction with my coach will decide whether I go ahead in November or wait until March. I've told my coach what I consider my lowest acceptable distance is and given her instructions to assess the situation objectively for me since any decision I make will be clouded by emotion/obligation. So Tuesday's test will give me either a definite "no" or a "maybe". Luckily she and I are both on the same page here.




As I said to Fixmawheel...I'm not confident right now and its a lack of confidence that is reality based, not stage fright. Looking at the blue line, which is the Chronic training load you can see that I have a peak just left of centre, then a drop and then starting back up again only to commence a relentless downward slope. For those unfamiliar with cyclingpeaks..this only represents the workouts done with a power meter on; some of the gaps are rest days, others are with HRM or yet others PE/nekid. The pink line is the acute training load, the green is the stress balance (rest) and since form =fitness+freshness, my green line is fine, my blue line is not.


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