For the last week and half I haven't been able to get out on my shiny new bike.
Cycling the Serrania de Ronda is hard work and the motor on the bike died, or at least appeared to die.
A friend spotted a wiring problem that with a bit of jiggling got the motor working again, however the fault isn't completely fixed, I suspect the wire is attached but loose and possibly not connecting 100% of the time. It's a closed unit so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to fix it, and the shop I bought it from is closed for a 3 week holiday.
So, picture a slightly overweight guy, just getting his stamina back, then not able to ride the bike and having to make do with walking, and then two weeks later getting back on said bike and thinking he can just power up his muscles and go cruising around the mountains.
Yeah.
That's what happened this morning. Said overweight guy had no idea the human body could lose so much condition in two weeks, worst of all, the walking around the hills we've been doing hasn't been much help. Different muscles getting used.
Walking up the hills around here I've been using mostly calf and upper feet muscles, which I guess sounds reasonable. This morning on the bike I noticed those muscles were fine, no problem, but the thigh muscles, and shoulder muscles really hurt. And I'm not even going to mention the um, well you know those muscles around the very top of the thigh. I swear I need to stop being so motivated to outdo my previous efforts.
Perhaps it's just time to take things easy and accept that slightly overweight people with stamina issues need to build up to these things.
By the way, the picture you see here is what I see every time I cycle this particular route. The rockfall happened a couple of years ago but now and again a few more stones come tumbling down. The road at this point has an incline of about 50m over a 400m stretch. No idea what that means in terms of gradients but even small cars struggle. The photo was taken this morning. I was in the shady part where the road is.
