Deep one perfect morning

Saturday was a perfect day to be riding a bike, 26 degrees and hardly a breath of wind. I dawdled around the house for a while and eventually headed off to Mt Lofty just after 9am. I thought I might possibly go further than that but I'd see how my legs felt when I reached the summit.

For once I remembered to put the heart rate monitor on. I've been increasingly conscious of my heart rate being pretty high when putting in the maximum effort, so I thought I'd try and keep it around 160 - 170bpm when doing a climb. Using the standard old maximum heart rate calculation of 220bpm minus your age, this is probably near my maximimum and evidently I shouldn't be exceeding 90% of my maximum heart rate. However, that calculation is general at best and I actually feel quite okay sustaining that heart rate for the majority of the hour or so that it takes me to do the Mt Lofty climb. On this occasion my average for the climb was 174bpm with a maximum of 185bpm. My average for the whole ride was 160bpm. I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Anyway it was a great ride up there and busy with cyclists as is usual on a Saturday morning. I was still about 5 minutes off my best time for the climb but feel like my legs are gradually returning. After the shattering experience of Amy's Ride last week, I think I just need to ride more regularly. I reckon an hour or so on the trainer every night will do me the world of good.

After a break at the summit I felt okay and decided to keep riding. I contemplated heading north through Norton Summit but ended up doing a loop through Summertown, Balhannah, Verdun, Bridgewater and back to Crafers. It was more or less the loop from the Mt Lofty Challenge ride last March so I knew that there was a fair few hills too negotiate, but I felt up to it. Here's some pics:

Just before Summertown and pretty as a picture ....
who wouldn't want to ride a bike in the hills on a day like this???

Germantown Hill - hard work but thankfully short.

The loop was around 32km or so and was just magnificent on Saturday - plenty of challenging climbs, lots of downhill runs and pefect weather. Those nasty hills before and after Bridgewater haven't gotten any easier since March but I managed to get up each of them without stopping (apart from the quick photo opportunity on Germantown Hill), which is more than I could do last week. I arrived back in Crafers with my legs fairly well spent, but thankfully not cramping like last week. Maybe the magnesium is working, maybe it was just because it was a little cooler. Anyway, from Crafers it was 25km of mostly rolling down the big hill.

It ended up being a pretty big ride, my second biggest in fact. It was 84km with just under 1400m of climbing which was basically the same as the Mt Lofty challenge ride. My time of 4:25 was pretty much the same as that ride as well, which I guess means that my fitness level is about the same as it was back in March. All thing considered, I'm reasonably happy with that.

Needless to say my average of 18.8km/h for the ride is very slow. I'm particularly slow going up hills and I'm frequently overtaken by faster cyclists, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm happy just to grind up those hills and get there eventually. Mind you, I'm pretty keen on getting a bit faster and I'm sure I will if I keep at it, but at the end of the day I'm just really happy to be able to go the distance.