Our intention was to head off in the school holidays for a week long family bike trip. We were going to drive out to Kingaroy, camp there for the first night, then ride the Kilkivan to Kingaroy Rail Trail and back again. With all the gear ready in the garage, dry bags all but finished being packed, food purchased and all done bar the loading of the car, four out of the five of us came down hard with the flu.
We were due to leave on the Wednesday, got sick on the Tuesday, the day before leaving, and didn't recover until the following Wednesday.
So what do you do when there's still a little time left of the holidays? Pack up and at least go camping for a couple of days...and that's what we did.
We're set up at Benarkin at the moment. Why Benarkin you may ask? Well it's quiet, free, and has great amenities.
Benarking is situated about one to one and a half hours north west of Brisbane, and if you have read my blogs, I have just completed a ride from Bundy to Brisbane. Benarkin is a place I camped on my ride, the first night after hitting the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail.
There's not much here but a general store with friendly opperators, and a few houses. It's not far off the D'Aguillar Hwy and only about five kilometers east of Blackbutt. But like I said, it's free, quiet with hot showers and clean toilets. Plus it is on the BVRT, and that can't be a bad thing.
We were nearly going to stay at home but my wife got a call to tell that her aunty, who had had dimentia for some time, had passed away. She was planning on going to the funeral in Brisbane, and thought it may have been this same week, but it wasn't. So we thought we'd head off a little earlier to just have a couple of days away before we had to attend. So Benarkin before Brisbane sounded a great option.
Death doesn't scare me, I have no fear of it at all. Sure it holds sadness and yes, some go well before their time. But sometimes, just sometimes there are fates worth then death, dimentia as my wife's aunty had, Motor Neurone as my mother-in-law passed from...sometimes I think Death can be a great friend and the ultimate healer.
But I'm not here to talk about death and the mysteries of life, I have no vested interest in The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy.
So sitting here at the same little picnic table that I sat at cooking my dinner only several weeks ago, now blogging with head torch on and a cold can of Great Northern beside me is a little surreal.
In the end I'm glad we didn't end up pushing for a cycling trip. Am I dissapointed, hell yes. But we, as a family we went for a gentle ride down the The Fettlers Rest and back today, and boy did we feel it.
People rave about fitness when cycle touring, but I have to disagree. It doesn't take a whole lot of fitness to tackle a short ride of say, thirty kilometers per day. At this level if you were to undertake a short weekend trip there would not be any great issue. Yes, your legs and buttocks would probably get a bit sore, but that would improve as you went along. I said to my wife today after the short ten kilometer round trip, "You're 10 kms fitter than you were before you left". I'm still working out if that was the right thing to say. You see, I'm not slow, I just don't listen fast...lol.
But my point here is that she did it. Would she have handled the thirty kilometers per day that we had planned to do do even though she wasn't experienced or fit? Yes.
You see, whilst relative fitness isn't that big of an issue, good health is. There's a big difference between being unfit and unwell. Even I struggled today pulling our little makeshift doggy trailer with our twenty kilogram, 100% pure bred mut behind me. Down to the Rest is a - 2 % grade, great going down, but the long, even though not steep climb home made one work.
Now had we not been sick, yes, it still would have probably been a good work out, five kilometers at a 2 % gradient is like that. But usually it is not so much of a problem.
What's my point here...don't let your fitness, or lack of, stop you, especially if you intend on just a shortish trip way on your own, or with the family. However, if unwell than that is a different story. Like death, there are worse things than being unfit, and being unwell is one of them. It is here that you learn to become flexible. A cycle tour is just a holiday, and on a holiday shit happens. You can get sick, suffer an injury or worse. This is when you learn to change plans, cancel them or maybe stay put for a few days whist things improve.
Let me put things into perspective here. When I started touring I was fit, really fit. I raced, now I wasn't much good at it but I raced. In a sprint I could blow my heartrate out to around 211 BPM and have it drop very soon after. Am I as fit now...not in your Nelly. The thing is, it didn't matter how fit I was, it was hard riding in "touring mode". I had to keep an average, I had to do a certain distance per day; and I thought I could do that standing my head.
I was wrong, touring is different. It is probably easier for a newby to cycling to adapt to touring than a fully fledge MAMIL come try hard racer. Why? Because a newby wouldn't care about distance over speed over time and their average on Strava. But newby or wannabe racer, illness makes it hard.
It's alright to change plans, take an extra day, or cancel altogether. The trail or the road remains, it will still be there tomorrow. Will you be disappointed, yes of course, but hey that's life. It's not a race, it's a holiday.
The moral to the story is, you don'thave to be fit, just in good health.
Cheers guys, and ride safe.
No comments:
Post a Comment