Day 61: Breaking the 100-Mile Barrier

May 15th, 2011

Kimba to Poochera
Distance: 183km
Total distance: 3232km

What’s with these small towns and their dogs, the dogs here seems to be barking so frequently all day and all night. I don’t blame the dogs but the irresponsible owners who god knows what they did to their dogs. Anyway, before I doze off last night, I plugged into my headphones (forced to because of the barking) and picked some of my favourite tracks on my iPod. Feeling inspired after that, I was determined to ride some great distances one of these days when the conditions are right. All this while I’ve been riding slower than what I hoped for, although it seems to be gradually improving.

Woke up this morning without thinking much about my determination last night. I aimed to get to Wudinna which was about 100km away so I quickly get myself ready and hit the road by 7am. I recorded 6 degrees celcius this morning, inside my tent! I gave up wiping the dew off my tent as every drop of water I touched felt like an icy cold needle poked through my skin. It took me between 20 to 30km for my body to warm up to a comfortable level. Had to spin very quickly and somewhere at 20km, it suddenly struck me that this might be a good opportunity to push my daily distance to a new height! There was no wind at all this morning which was great, a tailwind would be better but those days are rare. Wudinna at 105km was my destination, the next town with camping facility would be Minnipa at 145km, and after that would be Poochera at 180km. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, but kept on pushing nonetheless.

Reached Wudinna by midday and had a 45-min lunch break, a bit longer than I wished cause I did a detour into the town centre to use the public phone. After Wudinna, it was mostly a race against the sunset. Consequently, I didn’t take many photos today but the landscape was quite repetitive anyway. Not faraway after Wudinna, I met another touring cyclist! Mark, another English guy is riding across Australia from Perth to Sydney and aimed to complete the ride in 35 days. He took only 15 days to get to Ceduna from Perth which I find very impressive. But from Port Augusta onwards, he’s heading straight into Sydney without passing Adelaide and Melbourne. Mark was very unlucky today as his saddle was detached from the seatpost. When I met him, his saddle was tied to the seatpost by a piece of rope. Hope he manage to get it fixed at Wudinna. It was a brief encounter but we had a great time sharing our camping experience and the mice problem!

Rode passed Minnipa without stopping and that felt awesome! At rural places like this, I usually stop at all the towns for snacks or toilet break. But not today, I have a mission to accomplish! Limited my fluid intake so that I didn’t have to stop for toilet, maintained a constant pace, rode at least 12kmh on uphill gradient to keep the flies from following and continued pedaling while descending to make good use of the gravitational force. About 30km to Poochera, riding becomes more challenging, not because of exhaustion but my face was directly facing the glare of the setting sun.

Finally reached Poochera at about 6.15pm, not long after the sun went down but there was still a bit of daylight left for me to survey the campground and pitch my tent. As I was entering the caravan park, a camper saw me and said “You’ve done well!”, if only he knew that I just rode my very first 100-mile ride! The best part was I wasn’t feeling as tired as I should be, even had the energy to cook myself some Indomie mee goreng and washed up.

Anyway, here I am, tucked comfortably in my sleeping bag, and was wondering where did all the strength came from. I have some suspicion on the inspiring music I listened to last night. Anyhow, I hope my body is able to catch up with my overly ambitious mental counterpart.