Ohh, hard weekend!

Blimey, the last 2 days before an easy week are always kinda tough and this weekend was no exception! To make it more interesting I had to work on Saturday morning, after finishing at 1pm I headed off home, meandered down to the local school to cast my vote then quickly tried to eat enough food to sustain me for a 4 hour ride. Nadia kindly offered to keep me company for part of my ride which was cool as we don't see much of each other these days with all the training we are both doing. It was after 2 by the time we headed out and the wind had kicked in and it wasn't a warm day out there either so we were pretty well wrapped up on our bikes. We headed off to do the Bridge St ride which heads out through Spencerville, Kainga and round the back of the airport. We came across a fair number of drop-kicks who thought it was amusing to yell stuff at us as they went flying past at great speeds! Little charmers! Not! Nadia headed off home after we looped around the airport and I was cruising along quite nicely until I got to Templeton where the road changed direction just enough for me to get the full benefit of that head/side wind which wasn't nice at all! It was hard work heading out to Halswell and then all along the base of the hills was straight into the wind! Ouch! I decided against heading to Sumner, I decided that the tailwind back along the causeway wasn't going to make up for the sufferfest that it was going to be on the way out there. So I looped back along the base of the hills enjoying the tailwind until I had to turn around and battle it all the way home. Had a great run off the bike today, I was feeling pretty shattered as it had been a hard cycle and I got off feeling like I could barely walk let alone run so I was quite happy to have a good run, everything seemed to fall into place and I felt really good running along.

Sunday dawned with a 2 hour run on the cards, it was a pretty nice morning this morning, good running weather being a little cool. I had decided that I would run the ChCh half marathon course since it runs past home anyway and I needed to do a flat asphalt kind of run. I started off feeling not too bad but it all managed to fall apart and at one point I contemplated sitting in the gutter and having a good cry then calling for a ride home, however I took a hard pill or ten and kept trucking along. It took awhile by the time I kept waiting for traffic lights etc so I detoured home without doing the full lap around the river and I was still over the 2 hours. Then off to Corsair Bay for a swim, I was a bit dubious about this with the snow we had this week, I was expecting the water to be freezing! Let's just say it wasn't warm but I did manage to swim with my face in the water today without getting an ice cream headache so that was good. I didn't swim for the full hour as it was still fairly cold but I did swim constantly today and managed 2 laps around the bay which was good.

Dropped my bike in for a service today, had a good chat to Darryn about all the rattles etc my bike seems to have developed so we had a good play around and noticed that both of my bottle cages are broken! The wee tab at the bottom that holds the bottles in has snapped, that explains why my bike sounded like an old rattler last week when we were on those hard chip roads down in Ashburton. Phew, thats a bit cheaper than a new bottom bracket! Still at $65 each I would have expected them to last a bit longer than they did. So my wee girl is at the bike shop for a few days which will keep the boys happy as they like to play with her, I wonder how many times she gets taken out for a spin while she's there??