On My Bike!

It’s almost two years since I was last on my bike!

We used to ride two to three times a week as a big group in Sai Kung, when Covid had us working from home. I had gained strength, and understood my gears well enough to get me to Hoi Ha, and to relish that final hill back from Wong Shek up to Pak Tam Au, which, when I first started cycling had either killed or defeated me whenever I crawled up it. But once we returned to school, the mornings out dwindled and slowly but surely my strength and confidence on those hills declined to the extent that I didn’t want to face them.

So it was a real pleasure to re-start cycling here.

Kurt had contacted a club which rides up at Cradle of Humankind and they had a beginners group. I thought this might be the most prudent re-entry for myself, in view of the altitude (over 1000m above sea level) and my totally decimated fitness level, and I’m glad I took that option.

The ride was super-gentle and the hills were non-existent; the steepest was probably something like the slope to the Japanese Memorial on Tai Mong Tsai Road. The group was a mix of really relaxed riders and some speedier types so I sat at the back for the first part, just to get a feel of my new bike, and then pushed on a bit to stretch my legs.

The bike is amazing! My old bike, which I love because it is beautiful (and my first ‘proper’ bike) weighed about 12+kg, which meant that going up those HK hills, I was getting an extra-tough workout (which I kind-of liked, but which meant that I was always at the back of the pack). And the gears could be a bit temperamental as well, every so often. This new bike is a machine. It must weigh about 8kgs, is a bit shorter, so more comfortable to ride, and the gears glide and click with a slick, confidence-inspiring self-assurance. It was just so easy! Now speed is an option even up the inclines (I hesitate to call them hills).

The only fly in the ointment on this ride was that my Garmin, for some reason crashed when I switched it on at the start of the ride, so I have no record of cadence or speed. Speed was super-slow because I just wanted to spin, but it would have been nice to have had cadence, and also the route.

I only did about 15km, I think; my knee, which I messed up in Hong Kong had started to twinge by the time we got towards the starting point, and they mentioned that the next section, if I carried on, had a hill. Not wanting to strain it, first time out, I declined and returned to the car. Kurt carried on, and later drove the route they took as we drove home, to show me. The ‘hill’ was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hill, so next week, hopefully, I’ll do a bit of a longer ride.

The countryside out there is spectacular – rolling hills, open country with a huge game reserve, and roads to die for. People moan about the roads here, but the ones we were riding were heavenly. Smooth, with a good ‘hard shoulder’ for cyclists and runners to keep away from the few cars which happened to be passing.

The other, maybe even greater thing (for me, who loves my bed), was that the ride started at 8am. In Hong Kong we were returning home before then on work mornings, having set off before 6, and even Saturday rides had to start at that time to avoid the heat and traffic. The lack of traffic here was a real joy. Like Hong Kong, the driving can be ‘interesting’, so being on a bike on a busy road is not ideal. But up at Cradle, there were wide roads hardly any cars and just joggers and cyclists to greet.

And the altitude was not an issue either. It’ll be interesting as we start to do more challenging rides, how that plays out; as we were driving to the Cradle, we did go up and down some very long climbs, so my enthusiasm might be tempered a little after one or two of those, but for the time being, just being out and spinning, and meeting nice people is a very good way to spend a Saturday morning.