Saltwater wells in my eyes...

I am a few days behind on my blogging. I made my first schnitzel on Monday night and it was good. I took a photo which I’ll post when I make the quantum leap to plugging my camera in.

Secondly, a new postcard arrived. Even though the deadline has passed, this is actually a good thing – I don’t think anyone else noticed, but I totally miscalculated the number of challenges on my List page. I counted 4 of Jacob’s challenges, and there should only have been 3. So I only had 28. But now I have 29 again. So it’s ok.

Yay! A happy face in the mail, upside down in an envelope as a reflection of her journey from right-way-up-London to wrong-side-down-Sydney, and a lovely letter to boot. There really is nothing to brighten the soul like a handwritten letter. Thank you, Karen.

The new challenge: “Create a protest song, warning of the dangers of climate change. Once completed, give the song to an environmental charity and get them to put it on their website. We need you to help save the planet!”

I puffed my chest out. Saving the planet has a nice ring to it. My 25th song for the year. This will be my most prolific period, like, ever.

Straight faces

During the course of the ride, I think I can safely say we made 2 strangers laugh. The first was a lovely lady cyclist we met on the incline between Waterfall and Red Cedar Flat – Carly and I were talking about inspirational sausages at the time. The second was as we pulled up at a traffic light in Thirroul, and I (perhaps pre-emptively) exclaimed “We’re so close!” An older, wiser cyclist, had a good chuckle at this.

That brings me to a grand total of 4 laughing strangers and a newfound determination to find a way to catch up on this. One of my ideas had been to break into a dance whenever I could hear somebody’s iPod on the train. I tried it this morning but all I got was one slightly alarmed businessman, one confused urban youth and a carriage full of commuters getting suspiciously more interested in their phones and books all of a sudden.

Sydney to Gong - the saga

5.20am. That’s what time it was when Ben left the house, in the dark, on Sunday morning. I wished him luck, waved goodbye, and decided to try to get another hour’s worth of sleep before getting ready myself. It didn’t work. We were too buzzy.

I had planned big things for Woodstock the bicycle – he was naked: pannier-less, sans-basket. I thought I could shove a bag with a change of clothes and various other goodies under the pannier rack, but then I freaked out at the last minute, worried that the bag would come flying off and wreak all kinds of havoc. So in the end I went with a bottle of Gatorade and a lightweight jacket, with my ID and some loose change in a coin pouch in the back of my gym pants. We were streamlining. In my mind, I needed all the help I could get and if that meant slightly less wind resistance, then I’d take it.

Woodstock and I met Carly-le and her new bike Lady Bump at Newtown station. Carly was even wearing an orange bike shirt, which for someone who has more than a passing aversion to this colour, was already a spectacular step forward. One small step for lady, one giant leap for lady-kind! We wheeled our way down to Sydney Park and were greeted with our first volunteers, frantically waving their plastic noisemakers and pointing giant foam fingers leading us to the start line. We hadn’t even started and we were getting cheers.

Ben’s group had left the starting line at 6.15am so he was well on his way. Our start time was 8am. We saw the main group surge from under the starting flag while we ate a preparatory Mars Bar, shared a free muffin and pinned our rider numbers on. We also nabbed some free Power Bar Gel Blasts, intense little chewy sweets claiming to be pure energy. We saw two bears on a tandem go by. And then we went under the flag, and were on our way. It was 8.05am.

If there was one thing we didn’t want to do, it was burn out early. Neither of us had ridden anywhere even close to 90km in one sitting before, so our mantra became “slow and steady finishes the race”. Most of the roads at the start were segregated by witches hats, so I felt pretty safe, and since we’d left after the main 8am rush we didn’t have the problem of being stuck within a cluster of cyclists (or a ‘peloton’ as I learnt the collective term is for such a group). This had actually been one of my main concerns – being trapped in a pack and having to keep up with them for fear of causing an accident. Fortunately we had long stretches of road to ourselves and were overtaken by many more pelotons as we continued to the first stop at a leisurely pace.

The bike track along Brighton-le-Sands was a pretty cool. To our left was Botany Bay and on the other side of that was the airport, complete with 747s magnificently cruising in over the water. We decided to take some photos while we still looked ‘fresh’.

There were 8 pit stops along the way, and we checked in at the first one to adjust our seats (mine had slipped down to a level where I could just about lick my knees). 14kms down and we’d not even broken a sweat. However it was 16kms to the next one at Loftus Oval and I was quite relieved to see that one appear. We restocked on fluids and muffins (much tastier than expected). I’d received a text from Ben saying he’d made it past Waterfall and the 10kms after that were awful. We tried not to pay too much attention to it.

We passed the third checkpoint, Engadine, where the 58km riders were joining us. “Carly-le,” I said, “We could have started from here!” We continued all the way to Waterfall where we did a quick refill of our water bottles and pushed on. Carly saw an ambulance with a woman inside looking a little worse for wear. We tried not to pay too much attention to that either.

I thought Ben had his checkpoints confused, because after Waterfall it got breathtakingly grand. We were in the National Park now and had a super awesome downhill ride for what felt like an eternity. Dappled sun through the forest canopy, whipbirds cheering us on, just a few other bikes dotted on the road, no cars. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was like a scene from some triumphant coming-of-age film. I felt like whooping and hollering and the wind whistled past like one long joyous high five. (I later found out that Ben’s group had been escorted down this section due to a quite serious accident halfway down. That, combined with being in a tight huddle of cyclists, made the experience not quite as enjoyable for him). It was also somewhere along this section that we hit the 45km mark. Halfway!

The next checkpoint after Waterfall was the National Park lunch stop. We had told ourselves we’d stop there and get a sausage, and that was quite a motivating factor once the wonderful decline started turning in the opposite direction. “Just after this next hill,” we encouraged each other. After what felt like a long time, and halfway up a particularly long and winding incline, Carly turned to me and said, very calmly, “Dee dee… where are the sausages?”

You can only imagine how disappointed we were when we made it to the checkpoint and they HAD RUN OUT OF SAUSAGES. Overall this event was extremely well organised, but the lack of sausages was a bit traumatic. Yes it was almost 12pm by this point, but it wasn’t like there wasn’t anyone behind us… we had to settle for a couple more muffins instead and Carly sampled some coffee. We had a little rest there and chomped up some more gel bursts before heading back onto the hill. Still 39km to go.

What we didn’t realise at this time was that we were halfway up Bald Hill – the toughest part of the course. Not knowing this was inadvertently an excellent strategy. It was reassuring to see how slowly everyone was taking off after the lunch stop, and we were all pedalling uphill but still with enough energy left to briefly converse with each other. There was an amazing man who had a buggy attached to the back of his bicycle, pulling along his wife who suffered from MS. We rode with them for a while. We also saw a surprising number of tandems and a few younger children putting in the hard yards. We even saw the bears again. We were so rejuvenated after the beautiful ride through the national park and the lunch stop that we didn’t seem to recognise we were in the middle of the difficult bit. We started overtaking people on these hills. We were machines!

Just as we started to tire of going uphill, a vast sky appeared. Otford Lookout greeted us, with 30kms to go.


This was the last time that Carly and I stopped. We were surprised at how well we were holding up, but we also could see Wollongong far in the distance. And the hardest bit was over (theoretically).

At the top of Bald Hill, we could see down into Stanwell Park and the Grand Pacific Drive ahead of us. Due to the steepness of the hill, we were escorted by police motorcycle down into the town, but at greater speed than expected. Going downhill is fun. The views were gorgeous and the beach smelt wonderful. Going over the Sea Cliff Bridge was fricking amazing too. Hello Pacific Ocean.

The last 20kms, while not terribly challenging terrain, was tough on tired legs. The hills were small but heaved with effort. Scarborough was the one place where we were forced to dismount, three quarters of the way up a sharp ascent. I made the mistake of trying to stand and pedal. It was my downfall (not literally. I am happy to say we made it through the entire ride accident-free). As we went by Scarborough Hotel, we observed a large number of bikes locked up outside. Turns out that many seasoned riders use this as an un-posted pit stop for a hard-earned beer. We pulled up at some traffic lights later and one of the policemen asked if we’d stopped there. We hadn’t, but some others in our pack had, and asked “you haven’t brought your breathalizer, have you?” In keeping with the spirit of the thing, the policeman patted his pockets and replied “nah, don’t think I’ve got it on me today”.

We were looking for markers telling us how far we had to go, and each time seemed like it was lying. “That definitely felt like longer than 5kms.” My right knee decided to complain very loudly at around the 20km mark. We passed 15kms, 13kms, then finally 10kms. We had made it to Wollongong. Traffic lights kicked in and stopping became the enemy – red lights meant a dismount and violent cramping. I tried to push with my good leg and keep the other one moving but without the pressure.

Then, a bike path, and people waving, and lovely volunteers yelling encouragement as we neared the end. Stuart Park - 1 km! I could barely believe it. Then we saw the Finish banner – what an amazing sight. Determined to finish strong, we both pedalled up the path – and then were waved onto the grass towards the finish line which was a horrible swampy mess. It felt so cruel to have to crawl through this quagmire in the final 10 metres and all I could think of was “don’t fall off now… please don’t fall off now…” Fortunately, neither of us did. According to my watch (which was later discovered to have gained 20 minutes during the course of the journey… strange), we arrived at 3.55pm. 6 hours and 50 minutes of cycling. We were still amazed. Did we just do that?

Mission accomplished

Just so you know, we all made it to Wollongong yesterday. I had planned to take some video footage at various stops but freaked out at the last minute and realised I had nowhere to keep my camera while riding, so I will have to share a few photos from Carly's camera phone later. I will write a proper post when I'm not still so sore and tired (and hideously sunburnt), but the good news is, we made it the whole 90kms and were still smiling at the end of it. I was telling people it took us 6 hours 50 minutes but that was before I realised that my kinetic watch had somehow sped itself up by 20mins during the course of the ride. Weird. So, we did it in somewhere between 6hrs 30mins and 6hrs 50mins, including stops. Ben did it in something like 4 hours, because he is an incredible freak.

I'm so proud of us! And collectively we raised $1700 for MS. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday, really.

Two more sleeps til the big ride...

I think I forgot to mention, I went to a cycle class with Scobie last week. I thought it would kill me, but we actually enjoyed ourselves! It was hard work, but was more a practice in controlling my head than my legs, who I think could have worked harder (but don’t tell the trainer that). It was reassuring in a couple of ways – this was not so much a Spin class as an Interval Training class. I realised that it worked out to be kind of like my regular street ride: a few tough hills, some ‘recovery’ stretches of road. The need to recover is so integral to me making it through any length of ride, it was nice to know that this is normal. I just hope there are enough of them. The trainer also mentioned “this is supposed to be a workout for your legs, not your arms!”, something I could definitely relate to and why I think having gloves is so awesome. So even though my head almost exploded, the class was pretty good. We had planned to attend another class this week, but then Scobie fell over and twisted her ankle and apparently wasn’t even drunk. Pffft…

All the radio stuff got me quite buzzy yesterday, and has definitely buoyed me to feel a huge enthusiasm towards the ride. I’m mostly putting this down to blissful ignorance and plan to utilise this complete lack of common sense for as long as possible. Loftus Oval, at least.

Blatant self-promotion

Well, technically I suppose this whole blog is blatant self-promotion, but I'm getting a bit more specific here.

Here's a linky to me talking to Peter Riley on ABC Illawarra. It was 7.20am and listen to how chirpy I was! Amazing!
http://blogs.abc.net.au/nsw/2010/11/sydney-to-gong-bike-ride-in-song.html?site=illawarra&program=illawarra_breakfast

Also, can you 'rate' our humble little band Dusker on Unearthed? We'd really like to play at the Big Day Out and if we get loads of votes it might get somebody's attention.



Back to your regularly scheduled blogging about challenges and stuff like that tomorrow.

Ray-dee-oh

So it seems this thing has got a bit of momentum. I’m going to be on the R-A-D-I-O! If you’re on the NSW south coast and are functional enough to turn the radio on at 7.40am, tune into ABC Wollongong 97.3fm and hear me stumble through some questions about the bike ride, probably only semi-lucid and trying not to spill my breakfast juice. If you’re in the nation’s capital, tune into ABC Canberra 666fm and hear me do it after I’ve had some caffeine in my system, around 11.40am. Both are live and I’ve never done a radio interview before, so I apologise in advance in case I accidentally say something ludicrous like “bum” or “fo shizzle ma nizzle” or “so hey, how about that Murray-Darling basin debacle?”. They’re going to play Ballad of a Substandard Cyclist, which is super exciting and totally weird. I wish it was this easy to get Dusker songs on the radio!

It’s funny, as I was hoping to keep a pretty low profile for the Sydney to Gong ride… just in case I flake out. I know this is not going to happen, because I am awesome, and hella determined to get all the way there. But still. Funny.