Port Campbell Prelude

At St Kilda, Selfie Stick Photo

Alan Bishop (Yellow) with Graham Signiorini and Graham's wooden pedal boat

Be Spon ride at Docklands

Cargo Bike at Port Melbourne

A week later, a different Be-Spon mob near Warrandyte.

Hi

A few weeks ago, I bit the bullet and entered myself in a couple of 200k Audax rides.  These rides are on the Great Ocean Road between Geelong and Port Campbell and involve the dreaded Otway hills.

Necessary for these rides is training, and even before that, I needed to look like I am training by riding in bike shorts instead of winter long pants.  So at the start or the month I broke out the legs for one of Robert Waryszak's Be-Spon ride.  I only did part of the ride but managed to catch up with Graham Signiorini and his wooden pedal boat.  40 or so flat kilometres on training day 1.  Here is a selfie-stick video I took of the ride.

During the next week I did my standard 30k daily commute, and last Sunday went on a slightly longer training ride, something like 80k with a few hills.  The hilly part of the Kew Boulevarde is only a few k away from where we live and I went up and down the hilliest part of it about 5 times, then rode on to Ivanhoe to meet the B-Spon ride group to head out to Warrandyte.  This was the full extent of my training and probably not enough!

Inside the tailbox of the bike with the drink bottle cage clipped on to plywood with Bulldog clips.

The full drink bottle ensemble.  A cable gland at the top of the drink bottle holds in the tube.

Along with the physical training, I fixed up the bike a bit, adding a drink bottle and fitting a Schlumpf mountain drive as the crankset.  Unfortunately the Schlumpf I fitted had short (150mm) cranks, which made the gearing a bit higher than it would have been compared to 175mm cranks.

All for now, next blog post is on the road, Geelong to Port Campbell.

Regards

Steve Nurse