I'm tempted to just leave it at that but feel like I should explain.
It all started last Sunday morning when I woke up with someone else's legs attached to my body. Overnight I'd been transformed from budding triathlete to arthritic granny. Walking downstairs was torture. Training was hell. It was no better by Monday as I hobbled helplessly down the school stairs followed by 29 young people, some keen, some not so, to take on their second taste of cross-country training - I wasn't a great advert!
Yep Ol, you were right ... I shouldn't have done the Devil's Burden hill race, it did wreck my legs and made this week's training one long and painful sufferfest. In fact, the only thing that kept me on the turbo at 6am on Tuesday morning was sheer bloody-mindedness. It would've been an outrageous waste of precious sleep time to have got up at the crack of dawn and quit. Still, no amount of bloody mindedness was persuading my adopted legs to accept a gear change. They were frustratingly content to spin in an easy gear, every time I tried to change up, they yelled "Nooooo!". By the time the hour was up they were screaming for mercy. I rolled off the turbo and onto the floor feeling miserable and defeated, mercy didn't come .... but a 1hour run did!
There was no time for mercy this week, I had a date with some day surgery and knew that after a general anaesthetic I was going to have to take a couple of rest days. I hadn't banked on three though. I knew hospitals were full of germs - I came out sporting a nasty little cold. Despite working with young people who breed germs incessantly at this time of year, due to having their little fingers up their noses or down their trousers on a regular basis, I'm not normally susceptible to colds. So much so, that when I get one I feel quite affronted and immediately want a full investigation in how it managed to slip through my impenetrable defences.
Anyway, it did, so Friday was also written off as I came home from work feeling decidedly ropey. It was the wrong time to scan Tri-Talk, a forum for triathletes, and discover that the IMUK rumour machine is in full force. It looks as if the bike course for this year's race is going to be tougher and hillier than previous years. I signed up knowing that it was billed as a tough bike course due to the amount of ascent, but as I looked at a picture of a muscle-bound triathlete tackling one of the new rumoured ascents, and pretty much suggesting that he'd rather stick pins in his toenails than tackle that extra hill twice, I felt a small rising panic.
The cycling does worry me a bit, especially when the weather gods keep conspiring to screw up my weekend training sessions.
Well, today dawned unexpectedly bright. I peeked out of the curtains expecting to see a blanket of snow and knew immediately that this was a golden opportunity. I crept downstairs, made IronPhil (who'd been working late shift the previous night) a cuppa, and whispered in his ear: "Wake up - I've had a message from God!" "The Lord hath spaken unto me, he hath seen my plight and parted the weather clouds, arise, we must go quickly."
I can't really say that conversation flowed much over the next hour, or that IronPhil said anything which I can repeat. Normally, he has the patience of a saint when it comes to me and cycling, today was different. I can only assume it's because I got the whole message from God thing muddled up. It turns out that I was wrong. We'd no sooner left the house than he brought down his wrath upon us. We spent the next hour in hell - a blustery, sleety, very wet kind of hell. As we reached our first roundabout IronPhil didn't engage in conversation about whether to carry on or turn around, he just turned. By the time we arrived home we were beyond frozen. IronPhil got straight into a hot shower, I changed into dry cycling kit and finished my session on the turbo. Roll on summer.
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