Today Was A BIG Day

Where to even begin.  Um ok.  We’ll start here.  I was contacted by email by Pam from My Re-Body saying that she wanted to ask me some questions for an interview on her site.  I guess more like ‘their site’, it’s a big company it seems.  It was pretty humbling to be asked for that and I just finished up writing the response.  I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Second thing, my RMT Sarah is doing the Sunday NFL Touchdown push up challenge.  Doing it you are supposed to do 15 push ups for every TD you see.  She expanded it for even the ones she sees by highlight or the ticker on the bottom of the screen.  I offered that even though I don’t watch NFL football I would take part and do 20 push ups per TD.  Since I’m not actually watching I decided to get an early start and did more than 300 before I left for my bike ride.

Which brings us to big thing number three.  Out of the blue, well more like after I did the whole fitness bucket list post, I decided I would ride 50km in a day.  Originally I had planned to do it in chunks, a couple hour long rides and then a half hour one later.  But when I woke up and it was 4C (about 38F) outside I put off the early ride and had pancakes instead.

11:30 rolled around and I finally was ready to get moving.

I had planned out a bit of a route ahead of time to be sure I was going to make 50km, so I left and headed down Selwyn road.

It’s a fairly smooth ride really but the road was busier than I thought.  It took me about half an hour to make it to the four way stop in Selwyn.  From there I continued east over to Youngs Point.

It was a great day for a ride, the sun was in and out from the clouds, it was fairly cool so it was actually really enjoyable.  I thought that riding so far would be a bit of a task but I think due to the route I picked it was just something that was really nice to do.

After an hour of riding I made it to Lakefield.

Lakefield College School.  One of the Princes (or both? I dunno) went to school for a while here! It’s the first Lakefield sign I saw so I snapped a picture of it.

The smoke stack.  I think it’s actually part of SGS, but I’m not sure.  Pete’s place and our paintball field are right by here.

From there is was back onto the bike path between Lakefield and Peterborough.

That road there is the river road, the scenic route between the two places.  It was shortly after this picture that I caught sight of a road biker travelling on it.  I decided it was time to race even though I was more than an hour into my trip.

I’ve been guilty of this before.  Now this person had no idea we were racing which is what levels the playing field for me I think.  I have bigger more frictiony tires, only 21 mountain bike gears and the rough surface of the trail to ride on as things hindering my speed.

By the time I came off the trail at Trent University…

The road biker was pretty far behind.  So far you can hardly even pick them out in the picture below.  You’ll have to excuse the angle, it was taken over my shoulder as I rode (many of the pictures are taken while I was riding).

There, see them.  Yeah I was that far ahead.  Go me.

I rode all the way down to the London St. walking bridge and stopped for a second to snap a picture of some ducks enjoying the sunshine.  By now I had been riding my bike for about 1:40.  When I had set out I was hoping to do this in less than 2:30 and it looked like that was going to happen.

Eventually I got onto Chemong road and while riding I saw this flock of birds taking off from the bush at the bottom of the picture.  Seriously look at the big version, it’s pretty neat.

While I was stopped I noticed that my pedal was cracked.  I had been wondering for the last week or so why that side felt a bit funny and finally I knew.  I’m really glad that it didn’t full out break while I was out, it could have been a serious long walk home!

Next stop was Bridgenorth.  I was finally back home, it was almost 1:45pm and I was starving.  I felt that all this riding had earned me a bit of ice cream so I made a stop.

The ice cream place in Bridgenorth is great.  It’s cheap and really good.  I got their peanut buster parfait knock-off.

It’s a quick ride home from there and the whole trip was completed in 2:15.  Turns out my “leisurely pace” is about the same as my every day pace, I’m sure the race with the road biker helped out a bit.

When I came home and re-did the route on mapmyride it turns out I went 53.45km  A great way to spend midday in September.

This of course brings us back home and back to the TD push up challenge.  Sarah had been keeping me up to date via Twitter as to how many push ups she had done so far since the football games started at 1pm.  Immediately upon my return home I stepped in the breezeway and did 80 push ups.  All through the afternoon I have been doing sets of 80, or 60 one of 50 and now for the last set…

48…49…50!

That makes 1000!

Yeah one thousand push ups.

Like I said, it was a big day today!