Falling in love on Mount Stromlo

I spent the weekend down in Canberra. The new bike I bought a couple of weeks ago, I've finally been able to take off the road and down some serious trails and tracks.

Saturday was spent around Mt Stromlo, I have never had that much fun climbing up the side of a huge hill, and the downhill was amazing. The track is amazingly well designed and the whole place is immense fun. I even had a try at the 4x track, lost control, an old man laughed at me and I landed hard in my seat. The second day was spent dodging trees flying through Majura pines forest. I rode my first see saw, did my first jump across a gap, and did the steepest downhill (more of a drop than a hill) without hurting myself too badly, it was an amazing feeling.

The weekend unfortunately the amount of fun you could get was directly proportional to your fitness. We did about 30km's of cross country on the first day and I couldn't walk at the end of it, which was a shame since that only took us around 2.5 hrs. So there is something to work on before I get back out there. Next time I think we're going to head up with a trailer and 8 bikes and take turns shuttling eachother to the top and just taking the downhill. I look forwards to it, that feeling of flying is pretty damn good (and the times when you are actually flying).

Its funny, its things like Frisbee and now mountain biking that have been a reason for a lot of my travel around different parts of Australia that aren't sydney. The more I go out makes me realise that sydney doesn't have it all. Melbourne has been great fun for Frisbee, and now learning that there isn't a decent mountain biking trail unless you're wililng to drive at least 1.5 hours out of sydney to find it...

Fitness wise, its time to get back into doing some harder agility and stops and turns. I am happy to have gotten my 2.4km run time down to 11 minutes, but this is still 2 minutes slower than where i want to be, but a good improvement from the 14:30 it took me the first time. I had a fun session at the gym yesterday with allan and evan. Started with a good run, did legs (still sore from canberra), one shoulder exercise, watched Evan do a painful drop set and then did some core stuff.

Started with some pushups then tapping the guy opopsite you on the shoulder, then just crunches, side crunches, leg kicks, supermans, plank and then one where you keep your legs straight, lying on your back kick them up and someoen stands over you and pushes them down. Good core session, quick shower then hop in the pool.

After the swim evan commented 'you're a lot better at that then you are at running.' its a shame there isnt more swimming involved in frisbee. I remember being able to do a squad session of 400m warm up, 4x100m on 1:30 30 secs rest, 8x50m on 40s 20 secs rest, 12x25m usually doing stuff like zig zags stop and starts etc (with shorter rests) then another 200m cool down. This session was 300m warm up, 4x100m on 1:45, 2x50m on 45s and then 100m cool down. It was funny, I was the most unfit person on the team, but looking back on it now beign the least fit person on that team was still a huge achievement to be anywhere near those guys. Its a long way to go!

So I finally got added to the suufa aug emailing list, and it looks like its time to get back to frisbee. Its been a long time and I've almost gotten used to not being able to play frisbee its not somethign I've been longing for so badly, I even want to try some new sports like hockey or basketball. Someone said to me the other day after I told them this 'hey all you need is one game and you'll remember why you loved frisbee in the first place.'