Conquering Everest

Now I know what you might be thinking. Everest is being used as a metaphor for some big challenge that we have overcome, some mighty obstacle of immense proportions, and so on and so on. Normally having thought this you would be right, but not on this occassion! We (Carmen and I) actually did cycle up Everest and I must say, we found it rather easy!

Carmen at the peak of Everest

As you can see however, this Everest was not in the Himalayas, but in fact was the name of a road in the mighty town of Rayleigh (Carmen's words, not mine), in Essex, and not even up much of a hill.You might well think that there are no similarities, and in fact, you would be right; although you would never be able to tell that by looking at how proud Carmen was to have conquered it.

Apart from Everest, which was rather flat, Rayleigh is actually surprisingly hilly in some areas, which made for a bit of a challenge. Whilst cycling on one of the hills in Rayleigh, me being so very clever met with a bit of an accident on my bike when my shoe got caught on my front mudguard and snapped it (*dumbass*). Due to this we had to have a short stop, where due to my great foresight and planning, I had not brought any tools (*see above*), so I couldn't get the mudguard off. Instead, I had to rip it off with my hands. We eventually made it back home, where Carmen then took a picture of the aforementioned mudguard to show you all my proud achievement.

My poor mudguard :(

Before this fateful day, which was a Tuesday we had a hard weekend of training. On the Saturday (the day after our previous post) we visited the gym and did some interval training on the treadmill, which involved lots of change of both speed and incline. It was a tough session and Carmen, with her little legs did very well, although she was very surprised by just how hard it was on the legs to walk up a very steep incline!

We then followed this up by attempting to do some leg weights (Carmen's idea, not mine). The challenge was that some guy, I don't know who as I did not see them (but it must have been some sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike), had leg pressed 400kg! Carmen being Carmen said to me, "That's going to be easy." She then sits down at the machine and puts her little feet against the metal plate, takes a couple of deep breaths and pushes with all the strength she has got in her legs, her face going bright red like a tomato in the process and the plates do not move even a millimetre; if anything Carmen actually pushes herself backwards. (Here is a link to a picture of what 400kg looks like on the leg press). The morale of this story being, try and realise that 400kg is actually 8 times your own body weight! And stop being so boastful!

We followed this up on Sunday with our first offical outdoor cycle. It was the first day of good weather in Essex we have had for quite a while, so we decided to cycle to my badminton match. (For those of you who don't know, I play a lot of badminton; *and I'm sure he'll bore you all with all the badminton he's playing!*). We then had a short break whilst I played my match, winning 9-0 I must hasten to add (*see, I told you so!*). After our short break we then headed down to Southend sea front. It was extremely crowded down the seafront for the first day of sunshine, considering, I will say, it was far from being warm outside. I noticed even that most people were not even wearing many clothes, and/or shoes! It's surprising how at the slightest sign of sunshine people in this country start taking their clothes off and riding around in their cars with the roofs down!
We then continued along the seafront and rode all the way along till Shoeburyness where we stopped for a quick refuel.

Carmen on her newly acquired freebie bike!

Me refuelling in Shoebury

After this quick refuel we headed back along the seafront with the plan in our heads to cycle back home, but unfortunately we didn't quite make it as far as we wanted. Carmen was still feeling the aftereffects of lifting 8 times her own body weight the previous day on her little legs. So we decided to catch the train back from Southend to Benfleet (where we live), blocking the entrance of one of the doors in the process with both our bikes so no one could get in or out of that particular door. This ended up in total being two and a half hours of cycling since we left home, which wasn't too bad really, for a first session.