Now I’m officially exhausted. Just got back from the Blue Mountains after going mountain biking with Kevin, Tom & Niall. We did the Narrowneck Ride near Katoomba. It’s 27km out and back fire trail, with the best scenery of any ride we’ve done so far. There’s a pretty steep hill straight after the start of the ride which myself and Tom got off and walked up. He got a bit dizzy, which he thought might have been altitude sickness, since we were over 1000m above sea level. This was the first MTB ride we’d done in about 6 months and was easily the highest – the other ones in the Blue Mountains were in the lower ranges – and with the hard hill sending all the blood rushing to the legs, dizziness is not that surprising. We took things a bit easy for a while, which suited me down to the ground after yesterday’s ride.

At the end of the ithmus were the most amazing views: 270 degrees of wilderness with the Warragamba Dam (Sydney’s main water supply) off in the distance. A real feeling of being in the middle of nowhere, spoilt slightly by the high-voltage power lines running through the valley! We sat around for a little while, soaking up the “at one with nature” feeling ;-) before getting back on the bikes for the homeward leg.

There are a couple of REALLY steep hills on this ride, so I ended up walking a few times though I’m not sure that made it any easier! Still, for every uphill there’s a downhill and we made the most of those. One long final climb back to the car park and we were done, then it was off to Leura for some lunch and a pit stop in the best sweet shop in Australia (as far as I’m concerned anyway). I definitely want to do that ride again and the next time I’m bringing my video camera as the views are too big to capture properly in a still frame. Tom got a few shots, so I’ll get a few from him and stick them up here.

Tom’s bike computer read 26.99km at the end of the ride, so I managed to just top 200km of riding for the week. I also managed my goal of 200+ aerobic points so I’m pretty pleased with that. Early to bed tonight as I have (want) to do a similar amount of work next week too.

S: 8300m – B: 200.5km – R: 8.4km