With fairly short notice, I have to fly to sunny Sydney on busi­ness today. It will be my first time in Aus­tralia, I’m quite look­ing for­ward to it. Though how much of Sydney I’ll get to see I’m not sure. I have a full week of meet­ings once I get to the office over there.

I will at least have the week­end before­hand to recover from the 26 hours travel time and cram in some site seeing.

I’ll try to blog more as I go along.

I knew as soon as I sold my last bike that I would want another one. Within three weeks of say­ing good­bye to the Hardrock Sport, I had a new Spe­cial­ized Hardrock XC. (Click the image for details.)

It’s less of a bike than the Hardrock Sport but that suits me fine. It doesn’t have front sus­pen­sion neg­at­ing the weight sav­ings of the Alu­minium frame or absorb­ing my energy when I power on. I miss those great disc brakes though, but maybe I’ll get them fit­ted on this one at a later date.

So I’m back rid­ing after an 8-month break. I star­ted off slowly. I cycled from home to train sta­tion in the morn­ing. Then get the train to work. There’s no com­pon­ent at the other end, my office is next to the train sta­tion. I would then catch the train back to my local sta­tion and then cycle back home. A hair under 5 miles a day. A good start. It was no chal­lenge at all.

I did two weeks of that and then decided I was ready to cycle all the way home in the even­ing. That jour­ney home is eleven and a half miles! Much more of a challenge.

I was not sur­prised to find that the first couple of hills were very hard. They are short but steep. I sol­diered on with some sec­tions being quite a strain. But then, around half way home, I sud­denly real­ized that it wasn’t hard work! I was cruis­ing along at a com­fort­able 15mph, legs pump­ing but not work­ing hard. Breath­ing was reg­u­lar, not laboured. Just like 8 months ago. In all the jour­ney took 55 minutes to do the 11½ miles.

I’m amazed at the human body. With the trip home from my pre­vi­ous job only 7½ miles and hav­ing had 8 months off the road I really thought I would struggle to do that dis­tance . I guess my fit­ness levels must have been pretty high. The next four days were pretty much the same, though my time home got longer towards the end of the week. I think that first Friday’s jour­ney took 65 minutes.

Since then, I’ve done another three weeks. I’m clock­ing up a little under 70 miles per week. The jour­ney has become slightly easier. I have been con­sist­ently tak­ing 55 – 60 minutes. Tonight was def­in­itely under that. There is one stretch about ¾ of the way through that has been a real struggle, it is long hill. Not too steep, but quite long and with a steeper bit in the middle. A change of gear­ing strategy has helped there and I’m man­aging it better.

Over the next few weeks I want to increase my morn­ing dis­tance until I’m doing the whole jour­ney by bike. That will be nearly 125 miles per week. That should keep me fit!