the week that was

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 08 November 2004 12:51:29

the week passed by uneventfully aside from a trip to see the po-lice regards last sunday's nonse driver, and a little gym run with 2miles either end to get there and back. unfortunately the evenings are getting colder and darker so i'm forced to cover my legs up and wear an unfeasibly bright yellow fleece, does the job though as i usually end up being toooooo hot.

now it makes me feel old to write this but on saturday we went for a 'nice cup of tea' at the garden centre, i would add that i had a cracking bit of flapjack but i don;t think that would make it come over any more youthful or radical.
on the way back we stopped off at the new tesco extra which gives the sense of being enormous from the outside with it's high high canopy dwarfing the human sized doors. Inside it is indeed huge but with the usual depressingly clinical architecture, save for a nicely lit wavy roof section at the front. only having recently opened it was still busy, the queues were long and i'd lost the will to live by the end of the first aisle. what's the point?

sunday morning arrived overcast and drizzly as i got on my bike and set off on a new route towards coleshill. i wouldn't normally head quite in that direction as there's not really anywhere to go but i was off to do a 5mile race as a nice bit of tri training (centurions grand prix series). progress on the bike wasn't great as i kept having to stop and check my crib-maps i'd printed off but i made it there eventually pausing only to note the nice long downhill on the way into maxstoke that would turn into a climb on the way back!

the entry for this race apparently was the highest ever and i joined a long queue to get my number, it's normally bette than that apparently but they had some trouble with the numbers. no problem as i'd allowed plenty of time to get there, change, enter and recover.

the race ran along fairly narrow tarmac and gravel paths doing one small lap followed by two larger ones with the added obstacle of a low fence to hop over on each lap. had a quick natter with ultra minnie from the runnersworld forums who predicted she'd be doing some silly time for the first lap. so i allowed her her lap of glory before sneaking past although i don't think i made that much time on her overall.
i ran for a fair way with a guy from tipton harriers who i could hear as i approached was into a bit of motivational banter with himself and together we closed down on a few people. eventually i passed him and drew a bit of a lead but faded on the last lap a little to have him steaming past me in the final 20m.
i could hear him coming like a train thundering down on me, not that i cared a great deal at this stage as i was starting to think about my cycle home again.

after a cup of tea i headed off into some slightly denser drizzle but enjoyed the route home, and the hill wasn;t as bad as i'd thought. plus as a bonus it turns out coventry is pretty much downhill from there.. save a few climbs as i discovered. whizzing downhill on the big ring was good although i tried to stop my brain from questioning:
a) how much grip my brakes would have on the wet rims
and
b) how much grip my skinny tyres would have on the wet tarmac, leave and manhole covers.
i looked at one of the short climbs and thought you'd be mad to try this in the big ring, so i consequently did and with a reasonably high cadence i made it up.. until i saw the rest of the 'short' climb and had to grit my teeth until the top came.

on the way down chasing the traffic up to a red traffic light my back wheel confirmed a few things to me:
1) my brakes had more grip on the wet rim than my tyres did on the road
2) my tyres didn't have much grip on the road
i instinctively released the back brake as i heard the wheel lock and felt the back of the bike start to slew round and everything was ok.

another one of those short climbs, one of the last i knew and thought i'd try it in the big ring again. sadly at a rather lower cadence than last time my legs burned and crired out for a lower gear. in response my brain asked my eyes what was going on and they reported that the top wasn't far away. so brain in turn told legs to stop whinging. which they didn't.

all in all an enjoyable day out in my book!