Sunday 6 December 2009

My first puncture repair

Heavy rain through the week meant that choice of bike ride this weekend was restricted to Forest tracks - unless we wanted to spend hours ploughing through bog. Chose a route we haven't done for a while - another Kitty creation which combines classic forest fire tracks with a stretch of "proper" bridle way just south of Brockenhurst. The river you can see in the pic is normally a Husband-ridable-ford - even he didn't fancy it today. Several mushy bits but as it was New Forest silt as opposed to central Hamphire clay, it wasn't too claggy.
Big news is that I fixed my first puncture, with a little supervision. And it was a back wheel one. And I patched it rather than just swap the inner tube. Another Top 40 thing to tick off my list.
No deer, but some pretty birds at the beginning - loads of bluetits and a couple of nuthatches, and a v.handsome fox in the carpark at the end.

Other exercise this week - I tried tempo running with J on Monday. This consists of running faster than's comfortable. The benchmark is speech - normal steady runs have normal steady conversation. Tempo running means mono syllables - but not as fast as sprinting. We did it as a pyramid - after warming up & a steady paced start, we did 1 min at tempo followed by 1 min at steady pace. Then 2 mins at tempo, then 3. Decided that would do for now, so repeated 3, then did 2, finally 1. It went OK & we did the 5km in under 30 mins.
Cycled to work Mon-Thurs, but had a day off on Friday so heaved around 60L boxes of books instead.

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