A wind that came straight from Hades

What a ride I had today! It was somewhat awesome, I was feeling good. But the last 2hours I struggled through the most horrible wind I have come across yet (well, I probably say that every time I’ve had a tough day in the saddle in the wind)

The suggested ride for today was revesre long bays with a detour to perau and then a trip home through Lincoln. It ws to be 5hours, thats a long time for me to sit in a saddle. It started of as it was to end. I struggled across the causeway to Sumner at 20K/h. I had left nice and early to hopefully miss the worse of the predict no’west. This one was coming from the east though and I was just hoping by the time I hit the flat on the other side that it had changed direction.

I was feeling good, groaned a bit at the detour in Lytellton that made me climb a nasty little street. Got out to purau in good time. My plan was to find water there and fill up, but the sign said not to drink the water. So headed back to Diamond harbour and tried to find some taps there, but couldn’t be bothered looking to hard, so just bought some very expensive bottled water from the general store. I have been using balance the last few weeks, as it is the on course nutrition, but it doesn’t seem to give me the kick I am used to. So today I thought I’d start out with perpetum and then change to Balance and see how that worked out. What I like about Perpetum, you just don’t need to eat anything else. I’d normally have a couple of lollies or something to mix it up a bit. But because of my plan I left the house this morning with my pockets overflowing and feeling a bit silly.

I would have preferred to have Perpetum the whole way, but it seemed to work ok.

Had a fun tail wind climb up Gebbies and was up the top in just over 3hrs, feeling rather happy with that. The decent turned a bit scary. The wind was being very gusty on the way down and there were a couple of points where I was blown across the road. I had a nice fast ride down the valley with a wickedly strong tail wind and the slight decent, I was doing over 40K with hardly any effort on the peddles and feeling rather sorry for all those going the other way.

Once on to the main road the gusty wind was hitting me from the side, I was way to scared to use the aero’s and I was getting blown all over the place. On the way to Linclon it seemed to be lessening, but the road to Prebbelton was a crawl. I eventually made my way to the downs, but at the end I was still 25min to early. I probably would have been happy with 15-10min early but that was not right. So I decided to go do a lap that would take me over the downs again. Man that was hard, the wind was being fierce along the downs. I eventually crawled my way home at exactly 5hrs.

I ended up fluffing about before the run, mainly because the key wouldn’t unlock the door for some reason so had to find an alternative way in. I was worried about the 20min run after such a tough bike, but it went pretty well, I was actually running properly and not shuffling. Not going to say it was easy, but I was feeling pretty happy anyway.