friartuck

It is 6am, and while it is pre-dawn there is at least a bright orange Line of Promise on the horizon. I can even see the path ahead.

Very different from a month ago.

The air is cool and sharp – but with a clear sky above it feels more invigorating than painful.

Ace – I’m riding to work in a Norsca Commercial…

The path from Coburg to the city includes a magnificent downhill sweep past the Melbourne Zoo. A gaggle of evenly spaced, octogenarian golfers wheeling their clubs between holes on a nearby green provides a moving, swearing slalom course as I speed down said slope before leaning hard into the bend across the railway lines.

The next couple of kilometers are spent weaving over bridges and under tunnels before emerging near Footscray where I negotiate a 180-million-lane road and swing past two thirds of a non-functional Sky Wheel and on to Docklands.

Around Docklands I fall in with a clump of cyclists and am briefly embroiled in a phenomenon called “The Commuter Olympics”. This is where fat, middle-aged men stretch $10,000 worth of Tour de France lycra over enormous bellies while riding $150,000 carbon-fibre alien bike thingies 500 metres to work, trying to beat the sixty year-old vegan on a rusted out Malvern Star bought from K-Mart in the 1930’s.

The vegan often wins.

I wend my way through the puffing fields of gore-tex and flab and, nipping through Port Melbourne in the first rays of full sunlight, spot the sea…

The beach has an immediate calming effect on me. Being partly ADD, a calming influence is a wonderful thing indeed. The sight of the beaten-silver sea lapping up against pale yellow sand seems to slow the ol’ neurons and soften hard edges.

Which is why the ride along Beach Road is so bitterly disappointing.

The traffic on Beach Road is thick, constant, noisy, blaring and generates its own headwind. Having the beach on one side and that on the other is like walking into a cathedral for some awe-inspiring silence only to discover it is hosting a Fingers Scraping Down Blackboards convention.

Still, this sensory torture only lasts a few minutes before I reach the St. Kilda foreshore and Beach Road is promptly forgotten.

Pedaling from St. Kilda along the bike path as far as Hampton is pure bliss. Only two kilometers ago, anyone I met on the trail was either silent, scowling, swearing or trying to cut me off in an effort to prove they’ve still Got It (whatever the fuck “It” was). As I swish regally along the Brighton foreshore, fellow swishers smile and say “Good morning!”

Why the hell wouldn’t they? They live in bloody paradise.

At Hampton I check my watch. I’ve been out for almost an hour and a half. It is time to turn around if I am to get to work on time. Reluctantly I point my steed in the general direction of a small South Melbourne office building and wind up legs just starting to feel the teensiest bit tired from all their effort.

Riding back along the beach is almost as much fun as riding out. Only the realization that my training session is coming to an end detracts from the joy of soaking up the sun while sliding through cool morning air.

Hah. “Training”. It is very, very hard to remember that this is actually a training ride – practice for an attempt on 140 kilometres of rainforest coated hills around Apollo Bay.

It takes work to maintain the level of fitness needed to go out and have this much fun. There is a price to pay. Today, it has been so worth it the pain is utterly forgiven.

And as the weather warms up, it will only get better…