Testing in Stellenbosch and IDT... a lot of IDT...

Hey there! Sorry for the lack of updates, life has been quited busy recently. My school opened it's new sports hall, and decided to have an event officially open it, originally named the '24 hours of sport'. Yup, you guessed it, there was continuous sport for 24 hours. I had (stupidly) signed up for an attempt at the most distance in one hour, and then a crack at how far I could ride in 12 hours, even though I knew that I would never make it. I'm an optimistic guy, so I had a bash. In one hour I managed 49km at about an average of 97%HR! It was sheer hell, and I think it'll be a very long time before I try something like that again. Then there was an hour break before the long stuff started. I got going slowly and managed 175.7km in about 6 hours. I was incredibly bored and tired so I decided to call it a day and went to sleep. Total days riding was around 7 hours and over 200km. 

Then this last weekend when I was supposed to be racing a provincial at Cascades (the venue of the World Cup), I was instead invited and flown down to Stellenbosch for the National High Performance camp that was being held there for junior riders. On Friday, I got very sick with some sort of blood virus that seemed to attack the joints. It was nasty and the worst part was that nobody knew what it was! Feeling weak and shaky, I got onto the plane and made it down to Stellenbosh with my road bike, having been told that most of the good mountain bike routes had burnt down in wildfires a week before. 

The camp's purpose was to establish some sort of baseline testing for a new generation of Junior cyclist that would hopefully raise the standards to make SA more competitive on a global level. We did all sorts of tests, ranging from flexibility to vision etc. I was a bit mystified as to why they did not do VO2 max testing individually as they had the facilities and the time. We attended lectures about nutrition and psychology and a whole lot of other stuff. It was very useful knowledge, and all in all it was a good camp. 

This weekend I am putting in big, hard miles for Nationals in 2 weeks times. Next weekend is a provincial again (I desperately need to rescue my provincial campaign, 3rd then DNE!) Till then...