The Wildlife.

Over the last little while I have been doing “power intervals” and I was eager to see the results, if there was going to be any kind of gain in fitness or wattage output. Last night I made my way over to Edworthy Park to test out my achievements. When arriving at the top of the park road I had notice that there were a bunch of the Tri athletes doing hill repeats, and I figured it would be a good test to see if I could give them a head start and see if I could catch them, and then pass them on the way up on my trusty mountain bike. The Tri athletes were riding the Areo Bar equipped road bikes, and I had a hardtail mountain bike with Knobby Nic tires.

The first climb I was in the middle ring and the 3rd cog from the bottom. I couldn’t believe I was able to maintain that gearing all the way to the top of the hill. I had waited until the other riders had a good 30sec start on me before I attacked. I passed all of them on all of the three hill climbs that I had done. I had forgotten to time myself, but I do know that I am stronger than last year. At this point that is all that matters.

On the fourth climb I went on the trail that goes up to the left, it is a pretty steep sort of washed out single track. When I was a youngster we used to toboggan down this hill. I was climbing and had my head down picking my lines, and was looking ahead at all. But when I did look up I almost jumped out of my skin. There was a deer about 5ft in front of me, and it didn’t seem to matter to the deer that I was that close to it.

I waited and waited for the deer to leave, but it just stood there and looked at me, actually we were looking at each other. He was probably wondering why this person was climbing this hill on two wheels, and was interrupting his evening.

When the deer started to move on I had gotten back on my bike and started to ascend the hill again. But for some reason it felt like something was wrong with my bike, I couldn’t steer it very well and I was all over the place. I had realized that I was bonking and it was a good thing I had a couple of gels in my little pack. Once I consumed the gels I got back on track, but I wasn’t feeling 100%. I didn’t really feel good until I had gotten home and had some supper. This is the first time this has happened to me, and I can only figure it happened because I didn’t that all that much for lunch. That is my best guess.