Trè obvious

Of course this blog starts at this time of the year. During the Tour de France. Trè obvious. But it also begins the night after Simon Gerrans became the first man to win a stage for an Australian team at the tour. For some reason Charlie Sheen’s “Winning” comes to mind. It’s works because Gerrans won, it doesn’t work because he’s not a drug-riddled weirdo producing the lowest form of entertainment to some of the biggest audiences.

So this blog is acting as a release for me and my cycling obsession. An obsession that in the past has forced me to wake myself up in the night and watch the end of a fairly innocuous stage in a race I can’t remember because I was worried what the cyclists would think. That happened. Quite sad.

So let’s keep this first blog post short and simple while we sample the literary-pedals that’ll hopefully keep it turning.

I rode up Arthurs Seat the other day (a famous climb in Victoria), from the Bay side. I’ve ridden up the other side of the hill too many times to count but finally had a crack at what I would describe as the ‘hard side.’ Every serious cyclist in Vic has to have a crack at this climb. Now that I have you could say I ‘popped’ the Arthurs seat cherry, but in reality the only thing popping was my will-to-live as the speedo dropped to an average off 11.2km/h and my legs hurled incessant abuse at my life choices. 

 “Why didn’t you take up rowing you silly arse?”

“Be a gym-junkie and work your scrawny arms. Leave us alone!”

“What a wanker.”

Considering my Strava ranking of 1,744 out of 2,695 people to have registered a time, there is definite room for improvement.

But my point is this. I got to the top and decided to take a photo to send to my much better half. And it’s the taking of photos that I sometimes struggle with on a ride. What you see to the right is what I took. A wonderfully bad photo of nothing in particular. So the thing is, I’ve now gotta do it again and get a worthy pic to make up for the indiscretion don’t I? I can’t drive back up and retake it, that’s cheating, which is a massive no-no…actually, hang on, I'll confirm that with Lance.

I suppose, in a way, doing it again’s a good thing, however, this will no doubt poison the relationship with my legs further. They’ll be petitioning for amputation. I’ll just point them in the direction of Deutschländer pro-cyclist Jens Voight who says:

“Shut up legs! Do what I tell you to do.”

And they’ll flatly reply:

“Shut-up yourself, German’s are weird.” 

Stay tuned for regular update, videos and general bike related chat.

CR