Things I learned on my bike

Update:  Wednesday, June 20

Just found out today that the bike course at the triathlon actually runs in the opposite direction. Now what? I can't train on it that way because the traffic goes in the other direction.  Oh dear ... this is going to worry me ... the unknown. Help, anybody? Ideas?

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This morning I planned a 30km bike ride before/on the way to work.  I learned a few things:

The idea behind this ride was to keep my heart rate below 130bpm, and according to my heart rate monitor I had an average heart rate of 133, so I'm happy about that.

With nobody on the bike path, I found it hard to slow down and keep my heart rate low. I kept wanting to speed up just to see how fast I could go.

Decided to do a few laps around the F1 circuit, given that's where I'll be racing in September and boy am I glad I did. I will be going back there a lot now. There are a lot of twists and turns but the hardest part is the straight-away.  Wow, is that windy! On my first lap I slowed down to 19-something/kmh, and coming out of the straight-away there's a slight incline and a turn and that seemed to slow me down even more! Was not in the right gear at all.  Second time around went a little better but still couldn't maintain a good speed on the straight-away. Third lap went much better. That surprised me because I thought I'd be really tired by that point, especially after struggling through the first 2 laps. But I changed gears and found something comfortable that allowed me to keep above 20/kmh (only just, but still) in the straight-away! Was pretty happy about that. Lesson here:  I have gears on the bike for a reason - use them!

Then up to work and made my last big effort to get up the hill without having to walk my bike up. I did it! Not at 130bpm though - hahaha.

Final count was 1 hour, 22 minutes to ride 28 kilometres (2km short of my planned 30km - oops), average speed I think was 20.5/kmh. Obviously I have some work to do. But on the whole I'm pleased. I kept my heart rate down-ish, I discovered I can change gears and finally, I should really plan my route before hand to meet my distance goals.

Also, I did all this before 7:30am!