Somehow, I had forgotten how painful the last Monday bike trip I did with the Eurobug group actually was and here I was again, hucking a lung up as I struggled to keep up with the B group as the fire road we were on climbed up, and up, and up.
My rides with the Eurobug group are sporadic. I might do a Eurobug ride twice a year, hence the beating I take when riding with people who ride virtually every day. Every time I come the B group is bigger and there are more E bikes. It is the hills where the E bikes get away from the regular bikes. I am actually a fan of riding hills, because if you aren't riding hills, bicycling is basically sitting on your duff spinning your legs around.
With the hubris of one who has returned from hauling a big pack up and down real mountains in Canada and feeling pretty fit, I had approached the Tuross H Ridge ride with aplomb. Sure, it was almost 40 kilometres, I had not ridden a bike in half a year, and the wind was blowing crosswise at around 40 knots (actually measured by the BOM at 40 knots), but I envisioned all those extra red corpuscles bounding around my arteries and veins delivering oxygen to my working muscles at a great rate. I would barely break a sweat.
In fact, although I managed to keep up on the ride, the last eight kilometres back into Tuross Heads and my car was one of my most painful aerobic events ever. I swear that most of the riders "get the nose-bag on" as my Dad used to say, once the last regroup stop is over and the post ride cafe is announced. People speed off, fired by enthusiasm for cake and coffee in a truly Pavlovian response. I fell rapidly to the back of the group and was soon on my own, panting along the highway getting blown sideways.
Long before I got to Tuross my quadriceps had turned into hard knots of lactate seized muscle, my butt had blistered, and my back was spasming. I was convinced I was going to get blown into an on-coming car, so I took the longer but safer pathway route and found myself intermittently on and off the bike, forced by the blisters on my buttocks and my cramped up quadriceps to push the bike on flat ground hunched over like an old granny with a Woolies trolley. The final ignominy was being dive bombed by nesting magpies and taking three different strikes to my helmet. It was like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds."
This week's ride was to Donalds Creek in Deau National Park and I had been waiting for it to reappear on the schedule so I could attend. I was a little shocked at the increase in E bikes since my last ride. I have mixed feelings about E bikes. It seems that most people get an E bike because riding uphill gets too hard. Riding uphill is hard because it requires aerobic metabolic capacity, strength, and power endurance. All of these are trainable, even in old people like myself, but it takes work, lots of consistent work, and I fear we have become a society that shuns hard work and prefers to take the easy option. The big problem with compensating with a motor is that the weak muscles get weaker in a mobius like downward spiral that is increasingly hard to recover from.
But back to Donalds Creek. I was last in the B group. Actually, I was second last but somewhere along the ride the real last person disappeared. The last time I was second last in the group, the very last person later went on to have a heart attack. I think it pays not to be the very last person, but, alas, I was. Actually, the ride was not too hard, and, the little mini-gorge and waterholes at the turn around point were pretty. I think if it was not for all the E bikes, I might not even have been last.
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