So. The first day you Mountain Bike all day long over all kinds of crazy terrain, your body perks up and says "Hey, um, what THAT!? That was three times the ride I'm used to". The second day, it goes 'WHAAAA? You're actually doing this again? I hope you're not making this into a habit. Nobody invited me to that meeting." By the third day, I think your body says "OK Psycho, I'm not a machine you can just turn on, so let me show you a couple of things you got to worry about. Like, some pain. Time for that." And so...
I started today feeling all kinds of interesting new butt bruises and pains that I could *swear* weren't there yesterday. I also had some light pain in my right knee that came out of the blue. It didn't hurt all the time -- just when I pedaled. Kidding. Well, not really. But that one I took care of easily - I found that if I turn my knee in a little bit while I pedaled, the pain vanished. So I trained myself to do that over the first couple of hours and eliminated the problem. Next, to save my butt some serious rock bouncing, I think I stood on the pedals a bit longer than I'm used to, especially on long, violently rocky downhills. My Achilles tendons apparently both took a lot more of a beating than I had imagined, and in an hour they both felt sore. It got steadily worse throughout the day and I'm hoping that some ibuprofen, muscle rub cream, and a good night's sleep will get them a little happier. It didn't keep me from riding at more or less the same pace I have been, but it just, well, hurt. Technically, unlike running, regular bike riding doesn't really use the Achilles so much, so I'm hoping for the best.
Today's route: We spent the first two hours of the day riding fairly steadily uphill over rocks, dirt, asphalt and more rocks, and then across vast flat space. The only challenge was that we were riding right into the wind. Strong wind. Hot wind. So it slowed us down and dehydrated everyone more than usual. On top of that, the first pitstop was 25 km and and I think we all could have used it much earlier. Anyway, that was actually just a warm-up because to reach lunch we had to rise about twice that height (like 300 m) in a fairly short distance. That's not the kind of math ratio you want to hear. In the end it was actually a nice, long steady uphill but not as scary as it looked on the elevation charts. The cooler part was that once we reached the highest point, we had a 20 minute downhill ride (dropping down almost the same distance that we had just ridden up, but on the other side of the mountain) to get to lunch. It was very aggressive and very long but felt great not to have to pedal even once for over 20 minutes. The last part of the day was riding due east across the heartland, across about 30 km of open fields. I guess everything is just been planted because it was all pretty much dirt. But hell, it was a lot of dirt. It was 100% flat, which meant the challenge was just plowing through it while keeping hydrated.
We've pulled into a fairly well appointed youth hostel, where due to some logistical fluke it appears that I have a five bed room all to myself. Not complaining :-)
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