Pushing it

Today was the day. It was all Pat's fault. She made me do it. But I am rather chuffed that she did. Received an email from her last night when I was on my 3rd glass of wine to say 'we're on for it, be up for 09.00'! Oops, a couple of pints of water before bed required to get rehydrated! Then this morning, I loaded my mountain bike into the car and headed down to St Girons to meet Pat and Kev at our starting point. The route was programmed into my GPS. This was going to be a piece of cake.... Oh yeah? Think again, Penny! The region's mountain bike routes invariably deteriorate into narrow woodland paths, overgrown with brambles and bracken, with a fair amount of mud thrown in . This was to be no different and, despite the GPS indicating that we should follow the route through the woodland in a certain direction, the path petered out and we had no choice but to descend. The rest of the ride however went well and we covered 18km with a total ascent of apparently 570m, 1005 calories consumed.

On arriving back at the car park at St Girons, we hopped off our bikes, swapped our biking footwear for running shoes and set off back along the route we had covered on the bikes. This is the first time I had done such a 'duathlon-style' thing, so I didn't know how I would feel. My legs were tired after some of the bike sections, so I wasn't optimistic. But as I got going, I felt surprisingly good! We covered an 8.7 km loop of the route we had cycled in just a smidgeon under 1 hour - another 534 calories burnt. I was over the moon with how I was feeling. All I can think is that the bike leg had well and truely loosened up my muscles so they were working far more effectively on the running leg. Pat and Kevin also seemed to enjoy it, so we are all happy! It's looking good for our 20km trail race at the end of March :-)