Well, it’s official, we’re a team! Well, almost. To be honest we’re three quarters of a team at the moment. Dave, Lewis and myself had our first run out on our bikes on Saturday. Little Jason had a prior appointment with a hangover. So the remaining three of us braved the rain, the wind and the flies to complete a 24 mile hilly trip around Winchelsea and Pett on our bikes, in our cycling gear and with not a lot of enthusiasm.

I have to say, I was the weakest link on Saturday, the hills seemed a lot steeper, the downhill bits a lot shorter. I could blame some dodgy slipping gears on my bike, or the effects of a few too many beers on Friday night, but the truth is I just wasn’t in the mood for it, but that’s when you really do need to do it. So I’ve been told. So I dug in and managed to get round okay.

Lewis and Dave have no doubt been doing some extra training in the gym, because they were flying up the slopes a lot quicker than me. Dave swore that he’d only taken a couple of painkillers for his back, but I’m not sure. Can ibuprofen be performance enhancing? However poor old Lewis got a puncture (again) about 3 miles from the end of the run, so had to really dig deep to get round and finish in a respectable time.

We crossed the finishing line after 1 hour and 42 minutes having travelled 24 hilly, windy and very wet miles. We were soaked to the skin, aching, out of breath, but really chuffed with the time we’d done. I think for this early in our training we’ve done pretty well. Although Lewis (our voice of reason) did remind us that on September 6th, in the race itself, we’d be at the foot of Helvellyn, about to climb it, then onto the lake and then 24 miles back to Penrith… yeah, thanks Lewis!!

It was a good day, and a great start. Can’t wait for little Jason to join us and make it a full team outing!

Also, a quick thanks before I go to Colin Pope at New Romney Sports for getting our Flatliners T-shirts to us. We’ll be modelling them on our next trip out, so watch this space for the photographs.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Race The Sun 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.