The past few weeks I've spent exploring Dunedin by bike. It's been great riding old tracks that I hadn't seen in a couple of years and looking to see how things have changed over the past couple of years. Whare Flat for example - the trees were barely knee-height when we left. Now they're taller than me! The XC trails at Signal Hill have also been given some much needed love by my lovely husband Scotty who took to clearing them in his spare time while he was looking for a job - cheers babe! Bethunes/Forrester is riding as good as ever, and the new track built by Hamish Seaton (and Mountainbiking Otago) out at Nichols Creek is incredibly awesome! I've even done a couple of road rides - one up North Rd to where I got some wicked views of Dunedin, and around the peninsula for a bit aswell.
Last weekend, I entered round 2 of the Moana Pool Bloke Free Triathlon series. Not being a particularly good swimmer, I opted to do the duathlon (15km bike, 4km run) option. It was actually scheduled for the weekend before but horrible weather on the Sunday morning meant that it was postponed for a week. Last Sunday, the sun was shining and the weather was just perfect for an 8am start.
I hung around the transition area waiting for the "go!" signal and before I knew it, the swimmers were out of the water and it was time for us duathletes to head off on the bike. I took off pretty quick apparently, and was soon passing quite a few people on the road. Vrrrrm vrrrrm vrrrrm! Gosh I love my road bike! I was only passed by one woman (another duathlete) and I kept her in my sights throughout the rest of the bike section. Coming into transition, I noticed that there were barely half a dozen bikes on the racks - sweet! I was doing pretty well.
Then came the run. Urgh. Now I'm not a runner by any stretch of the imagination and had only been on two runs in the past two weeks as "training" for this duathlon. I was soon passed by one, two.. three.. up to 12 people on the run section in total! I had terrible stitch on my left side, which eventuated into a more generic abdominal pain as I plodded along on the 4km run. It was very tempting to stop the shuffling I called a run, but as usual, stubbornness and determination set in and I gritted my teeth and got on with it. Coming around the turn-around point, I saw one of my friends who had also entered the duathlon and muttered a "you'll pass me on the way back!" to her. Quite fortunately, I made it to the finish (where I found a seat on the kids playground) less than 30 seconds ahead of her.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear at prizegiving that I'd come second in the duathlon! (all the runners who passed me were triathletes.. phew). Not bad for my first effort but I can definitely improve, especially on the run section. I'd set an arbitrary time goal of 1 hour, and came in at 53 minutes and 25 seconds so I was pretty stoked with that.
I can probably get used to this duathlon thing, so I'm going to spend a bit of time over winter working on my running - not a bad thing to do in Dunedin when the last thing you want to be doing is rugging up warm to head out on a long road ride! I might even try and get some swimming in too and perhaps enter the triathlon next season.
In other Dunedin-related news, Scotty and I bought a house and will be moving in at the end of the month. The house is located between the MTB trails and work - ideal for training in Dunedin! We are looking forward to getting all our stuff out of storage and having a place to call our own.
I suppose that's it for now. My camera cable is in storage so I can't upload any of the photos I've taken the past few weeks on my blog. Check back in a couple of weeks and I should have some photos up :)
All photos: Chris Sullivan - www.seenindunedin.co.nz
1 comment:
Bloody good job mate! Nice one. Pity you are not up here with the Crazyman coming up!
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