? great preparation for a race?

Wednesday: I went to my usual kettle bell exercise class. Since my hand was still causing a bit of a problem, I couldn't actually use the kettle bells. So instead Jeff got me to do jump squats while clutching a medicine ball. I was supposed to go for a minute non-stop..ha!..the best I could manage was 15 jumps non stop. After quite a few minutes on and off, I then moved on to jump lunges plus ordinary lunges and ordinary squats. Today I can finally walk down stairs properly.. yesterday I could have been one of my elderly patients!

Friday: I may well have developed an ulcer... I drove Alex to the airport and he left too little time to get there..well by my standards he did! I think I was very lucky not to get stopped by the police for ...speeding, reckless driving, speeding, speeding, speeding, creative overtaking, speeding. I threw him out the car at the doorway into the Qantas terminal and then drove on to work in more sedate manner. The rest of the day I was in slo-mo..getting over the stress. So last night I was in bed very early in order to get in many zzzzzzz's so I could race well today. In fact I was in bed so early that I forgot...shock horror...to prepare the DVD recorder for the TdF.






Today's race was a 25km hilly TT at Yarra Junction...my last before flying out and my third TT in 3 weeks. Its a race that I've done for many years now and its not getting any easier. This time the bike was in full race gear..the disc instead of the Powertap, so no WKO powertap graphs to display. The weather was quite warm initially, sun and blue sky but by the time I raced it was going belly up a bit and on the way out there was a vicious side wind at one spot that swept me right to the middle of the road.

Previous years I've overtaken 2 or 3 people on the way out and then on the way back 1 of them and I play at overtaking each other over the really hilly section , with me behind struggling over the last uphill section. And that is exactly what happened again this year; plus I dropped my chain on an uphill stretch but even so I was 2 minutes faster than last year.

There are standards for each age and gender and in today's effort I beat my standard by....wait for it....10 minutes!!!!!!! earning myself a very nice $$$ prize.

Back home the packing up of gear starts..or will do when Ben arrives tomorrow to take pick up his birthday presents, when I'll ask him to take my pedals off..they're on too tight for me to shift them.