How to get Fit?

From Ride On

- Put yourself up against the clock!

After riding now regularly for some weeks, with many rides going past the two hour mark, I might have considered the 2 hour Novice Trail Quest route to have been something relatively easy to accomplish.


Instead, the clock really does increase the intensity and the effort goes up 2 fold. Our time was clocked at 2hours 11minutes, which was without penalties as we'd opted for the Novice option, being our first Trail Quest. We covered around 20 miles in those 2 hours, which is fantastic considering some of the long leg burning steady inclines. Plus the stop-start nature of using the SportIdent electronic checkpoints, which are much improved to the Lane Quest hand written (pen and paper) option. The distance covered just highlights the decent pace we were able to keep up.

The TrailGuru iPhone application wasn't able to keep up again, I'll be turning to a Garmin device soon for GPS mapping and dropping that into TrailGuru instead, the iPhone battery is not up to 2 hours constant GPS usage. Here is the TrailGuru part that actually recorded.

Towards the end, concentration on the uphill sections was all about rhythm and just keeping the cadence set and steady. Fitness wise - this has had a large impact and lungs and legs have improved because of it.

Photos of our ride are kept here.

On the fun factor - there was less of it than expected. We did get a few downhill sections worth the uphil section getting there, but the clock really ups the intensity even on the flat and it's always there in the back of your mind. It did feel like this was a mission than a fun event, which still included quite a few road sections that can drag.

Our scores might not be high, we scored around 100 points, but we certainly improved fitness and so the effort was well worth it. The NYMBO website is where the scores are kept, I thought the entire event was very well run, marshalls were very helpful and all things explained to us 'novice' guys in an informative manner.

Not sure how many more Trail Quests we'll do but this was a good way to keep the fitness high, however less road and more 'trail' would have been preferred.

Two weeks to the Dalby Trail Centre day out. Next week: back to local.