I hate getting up early.
0445 the alarm went off after very broken sleep where I kept waking up in anticipation of an alarm that was still hours away.
Crawling up on to the flight deck, I was confronted with the Chief who was nearing the end of his 28km on the bike with Band of Brothers playing in front of him; “great idea!”, I thought and rushed downstairs to get my Samsung Tablet.
With slightly more effervescence in my step, I clambered back outside, set myself up on the bike and took over, the A-Team Movie blaring out at me (hell yeah!).
Starting off where the Chief left off, I had the spinning bike in 13th gear and was maintaining a 90rpm pace. To be honest, that was too much for me so I dropped it down to 11th after about 10 mins and kept up a 100rpm pace instead. Where we are right now is freakishly hot. 0500hrs and the temp was already in the high 20s despite it still being pitch black and us cruising at a steady rate of knots. Being on the water, it’s also outrageously humid.
However, the plan for each of us was to maintain a 25kph pace and I could see by 30mins in that I was ahead of that so I kept plugging away confidently. Sure enough, as the culmination of my hour rolled around I was teetering at just over 28km and I jumped off to handover to the Daddy of the group.
I’ve not been on a bike, in anger, since John O’Groat’s to Land’s End, some 5 years ago. I haven’t been on a spinning bike since 2-3 months before that either (training for JOGLE while in Iraq). Sitting here now, I can certainly feel it in the legs but I want to see if I can crack 29km on the next iteration, in 2 hours time. From a CrossFit point of view, I am happy that having not been on a bike in so long I am still able to pull off a decent pace. Let’s see how it continues today.
If nothing else, I can eat sweets today!
In the margins, I have been becoming more and more interested in Human Anatomy and Physiology. Having suffered repeated niggles throughout my career, I have a yearning to ‘join the dots’ and develop the underpinning knowledge in order to treat myself…….and potentially others. Don’t worry, I’m not suddenly going to become this crazy CrossFit coach who starts ‘treating’ people but reading Anatomy & Human Movement (Palastanga & Soames) has really reminded me of the things that used to pique my interest back in school. Why I decided on Genetics, I will never know; I have a love of science, especially Biology, and these days I have a flourishing desire to help and develop people through coaching. Perhaps the two can be co-joined?
My Nomadic CrossFit Experiment 