16
Mar
2015

Week 15 of 20 Training and Fundraising Update

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last update. Last Sunday was the big day for 3Peaks, and what a day it was. After a day of drama on the Saturday worrying about whether I would be riding or not due to problems with my bike, Sunday morning came around and everything was in place for a good day. The weather was amazing, cool to start and warm all day.

As I had mentioned in earlier posts I was aiming to break 10 hours. There was a lot of conjecture at the start line as to whether we should go with the wave 2 start or hold back to wave 3. The decision became easier as wave 2 kept growing with everyone trying to get away early. As fortune would have it, I found myself on the front line of the start of wave 3, which when the gun went meant I had clear road in front of me for the descent of Falls Creek. It was 30km of utter excitement, hitting speeds of more than 60kmh using all the road.

I was travelling a little too well early and got ahead of myself at the first drink stop, deciding instead to keep going. A decision that would come back to bite me later in the day. By the time I reached the lunch stop I was well ahead of target, feeling ok, although the signs of what was to come were starting to appear.

The next 100kms after lunch were rolling hills and an incredible descent into Omeo where my top speed hit 86kmh. Then the fun really started, I hit the bottom of the back of Falls Creek well ahead of target, but signs of fatigue were evident. The first 13kms of Falls averaged 12%, by the time I completed the climb I was spent. I rolled into the drink stop and things went downhill rapidly, the legs buckled under me and the vision became blurry. A 43 minute rest to get the faculties back in order before heading off to finish the final 23kms, which just for fun included another 4km at 7%. I finished the day with extremely sore legs in a time of 10 hours 7 minutes – which unfortunately means I will have to go back and get it right. An incredible experience. These photos are at the top of Hotham and start of Falls, but note the facial expression seems to be the same in both!!!

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Given the demands of 3Peaks this week has been a fairly light week of training, only 188km, which has been good for recovery. Now that there is only 6 weeks to tour the next 4 weeks will be fairly solid training to get into the best shape possible for tour.

Fundraising this week has been good. Vittoria Coffee have been amazing, taking on a silver corporate donation and holding a lunch with staff to raise funds, which brought in $1,540. IMG_4370

Thank you to the incredible staff of Vittoria, especially Cass Prothero and Rolando for the ongoing support. This week they are supporting me with an email to 230,000 customers and suppliers – the potential is huge.

 

 

A few more contacts to follow up this week and I should be past my second goal (the first was the $12,000 minimum requirement) which is the $50,000 mark in the next 10 days.

In other exciting news, in the past two weeks I was advised that I will be captain of team Vittoria on tour, which is a great honour. Given the size of the tour this year we have much larger teams which should be a challenge to manage, but thankfully there is lots of experience on the team so there should be lots of help.

Till next week, have a great week and don’t forget to share the message to donate, every dollar counts.

 

Cheers, Woody



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