TRAINING, TRAINING, AND NO TRAINING

Tim has been down with flue for the past couple of weeks, well its a cold but being male its flue !! So Tim's training has been held up and mine is held up due to the mist in the mornings and a serious bout of lazyitis. The problem with training in Johannesburg is there has been several bad bike hijackings in recent weeks. Yesterday on a ride we were stopped by a guy in a white Land Rover Discovery, at first I thought Land Rover must be broken down, but no the gentleman and his wife wanted to warn us about hijackings in the area and to be careful. The guy was hijacked three weeks ago and told us the story of being held up at gunpoint and ending up with a broken collar bone, punctured lung and an assortment of other injuries. I had read his story on the Hub (local cycling website). We chatted about where we can ride safely and he asked what we are training for, I told him the Freedom Challenge. The guy was chuffed to meet someone doing the race, I was chuffed that he had survived his hijacking. I rode away remembering his words that he will not give up riding his mountain bike and give in to the criminals, fair do's to the man my hat goes off to him. If we stop doing what we are passionate about then the criminals win, it was nice to meet a guy that was not giving in.

We have only six weeks left, this time in six weeks we will hopefully have finished day 3, due to our race tactics I can not say where we will be !! well if we had tactics in the first place it would help. Tim has spent a lot of time working out where and for how long we will ride each day. We do have a goal to finish the race. We are allowed 26 days to complete the race. If we can do under 20 days then the old farts will have done well in my opinion, and all the days and nights of training and planning will have allowed us to achieve our personal and joint goal of finishing this race.

If you have read this far please have a look at the BackaBuddy site and donate a small amount to a good cause, so far we have raised NIL and it looks pretty shabby at the moment, any donation counts does not matter how small, it all goes to a great cause.