The weekend hasn't gone to plan. I think the combination of lots of work and some pretty big days finally caught up to me and during the end of last week I was feeling pretty ordinary. My legs felt like lead, I had no energy and for the first time in ages I really did not feel like riding a bike at all. When I did manage to ride it was under duress and made me feel even worse when I has finished. Usually I have a feeling of goodness and light after a good ride but on Friday I just felt wasted.
Steve and Nick were my nursemaids on a 50k run in pretty flat country. I didn't t take any turns out front, waddled up every hill and really just huffed and puffed a lot to no great avail. The boys set a pretty quick pace to start off with at around 32k's per hour. While I was able to sit at the back and be dragged along there was no way I could get out front and take my turn. Luckily Steve and Nick are cool about that and had seen me almost faint at the start of the ride after just riding over from home. It's about 3 K's. Basically they encouraged and gently prodded until I said I would ride further and then made sure I never got too far off the back.
So what was this mystery ailment? Who knows. I just felt ordinary. After a couple of days of loping around I decided that it was time to sort it out. My doctor said maybe I needed to take it easy. Why? I had been pretty quiet at work and not had too much going on. I guess apart from planning and executing my sons 7th birthday, that week in Melbourne of 16 hour days, celebrating my birthday, seeing the kids off to school, celebrating my wifes birthday and managing to ride a few hundred kilometers I had been taking it easy! Wow, maybe I did need a rest.
First cab off the rank was to let Gary know that my 160k ride with him on Saturday was a no go. Probably one of the smartest things I have done in a while. Second was to just sleep in. I woke up yesterday at 7:30am, took the kids to swimming with Alison, and then came home for nap. 9:30 am and I was taking a nap! I read a book, pottered downstairs with the bikes and generally lay around and did very little. This morning was supposed to be the day for the charity leg waxing but I think even mother nature knew I was buggered. It was pouring when I woke up. After posting up on MTB Dirt that I was postponing the event I went down to the park in case anyone showed up without reading the forum first. I saw Mike and Nick down there and proceeded to stand around in the rain and chat for an hour. Nick was out for a spin while Mike had just come down to shoot the breeze. Very pleasant thank you gentlemen!
So what have I learnt from this? Listen to your body? Yep. Listen when your friends and family say you look a little tired? Yep. In order to train you have to be fit enough and well enough to train? Hell yeah. Do a recovery ride, take a day off. It won't hurt you.
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