Tour de Singapore

Today saw the start of the second component of my training regime. Last night I prepped the bike and gear,making sure everything still worked. Up earlyish and over to the group meeting place. Wow, there were bikes and people everywhere, easily over 100 people! The meeting point is at a hawker market where people can also get a last minute coffee fix. A little after seven the convenors announced the various groupings, there was the longer Changi group, the fast long Changi group, the fast Kranji, the tempo Kranji and slower Kranji, I opted for the "tempo Kranji" and slipped into second wheel of a pack of around 30.

Pretty good immediate pace and after 5km the two leaders split off and I and a guy from the US called Tim took our turn. I was pretty happy with the way I was handling the pace at that point. As we wound our way around the north western side of the island we hit some rolling hills, the guys at the front just hammered the big gears over them and here my muscles started to complain about the workload. We turned off on a smaller road and this is obviously a every man for himself section as the pace went white hot, of course along with some more rolling hills.

I was glad as we re-entered suburbia and the pace eased a bit until we got on a major road which had a rise seemingly every km as it rose to a bridge to go over smaller roads. Eventually this was too much and I let them slip away. Keeping the tailenders in sight I was shocked to turn a corner and find a dirty bloody big hill, after all the hammering! Also at this point I was getting low on water. Eventually got over the hill but no-one was in sight, a rider came past me and I followed him hoping he'd lead me to the finish point but after a while I pulled up next to him to check and he was not with the group.

At this point I was pretty sure that I had gone past the finish point so I opted just to keep going home, I stopped at a servo to top up the water and blood sugar and then pushed it home.

All up 70km in distance in 2:20 which is an average of about 30kph! Not bad for the first time on a bike in quite a while!

Earlier in the week on Wednesday I started the running side with a hard tempo style 14km run, followed by a bad case of DOMS, on Friday I shook the starch out of the legs with a 9km recovery style run.

So that is week 1, a little abbreviated but a start has been made!



Here is a SportsTracks image of the route today, which also shows the complete island