Samford, Dayboro, Petrie, Sandgate - Phew!

Faye, Jacque and I left from Jacque's place at Ashgrove at the uncivilised hour of 4:30am for our ride through Samford, Dayboro, Petrie, Sandgate and return.

I found the ride really tough.  The girls had to wait for me a bit through Samford road and then I lost Jacque going up through the hill just before Samford.   So, I rode on my own out to Dayboro and just trudged through it.  Faye came back to collect me and we had a quick pit stop to fill up drink bottles before making our way to Petrie. 

I think the lesson that I can learn from having a really tough ride is not to back too far off on a recovery week.  This has been a pattern for me in that it takes me a week or two to get back to where I was after a recovery week.  I will have to be really mindful of this when I am considering taper week.  I think I will try and keep the same intensity but really back off the duration and hopefully that will work for me.  I will give this a go on our next recovery week.

I stuck on Jacque's wheel for most of the way into Petrie, so that was good.  The traffic was a bit worse than I was expecting, although they were really considerate.  There were plenty of concrete trucks on the road so there must be a lot of development happening through there.

Every time we turned a corner there seemed to be another hill looming ahead of us.  Thankfully none of the hills were particularly onerous, just long, not necessarily steep.  In fact they often looked steeper from a distance than what they actually were so that was OK.

I kept losing my rear bottle holder, the bolts had worked themselves loose, so I ended up having to stop a few times and tighten them up with my fingers.  After the 3rd time doing this I was getting a little annoyed and Jacque gave me some tape that she had put around her bottle to hold it in and I ended up tying it around my rear bottle holders to keep it from slipping out.  This seemed to do the trick.  I guess the lesson here is to check all of the bolts on the bike regularly and to drop it from a small height just to make sure that nothing is rattling. 

We pretty much stayed together after Petrie and Faye showed us how to ride from there to Sandgate - just as well as I think Jacque and I would have got seriously lost!

We had a nasty incident with a massive semi trailer driver through Strathpine.  We were on the dual carriageway with a large shoulder and we were well over on the shoulder not causing anyone any grief riding single file 1 behind the other when we heard a truck horn behind us and then the truck overtook us all the while coming over the white line into the shoulder towards us!!!  Well, you can imagine the words that came out of our mouths!  We decided that he was a fat smoker with an ugly wife and a really small pecker!!!  I only wish that we got his number plate as he really deserved to be reported.  What sort of person spots 3 girls out on a training ride doing their own thing and decides to threaten them like that?  Anyway, we survived and in reality he didn't even come that close to us as we had such a big shoulder.

We rolled into Sandgate and had a quick drink and toilet stop and then we were off.  Traffic was a little heavy on the way back through, but we managed to get through ok.  Unfortunately when we got to Jacque's place we had only done 100km's; we thought that it would be about 115kms, but it was a challenging ride with some good hills.

Jacque kindly offered breakfast and coffee which went down a treat...  the best part of the ride!

Because I am riding with people that are stronger riders than me I plan on every 3rd or 4th week doing a ride where I am completely on my own and where I am not drafting for any part of the ride.  It think psychologically this will be a good thing to do.  So, my long ride this weekend will be exactly that and I will start to do a small run off the bike.

Exactly 12 weeks today we will hopefully be on the start line at Ironman New Zealand in Taupo!!!!