Dave and Jen For Oxfam

After the beautiful day we had riding from Burleigh to the seaway on the Gold Coast last weekend, this weekend’s session pales in comparison. One of the great realisations of the ease of which we covered the 34km last weekend is that the distance or time in saddle is not an issue. The vast majority of that trip was on road with some fun compacted off-road trails near the end giving way to the odd stretch of loose sand. We definitely need more experience off-road and we continue to enthuse about heading to the trails in Nerang or The Gap.

Without the luxury of taking a full day to ride this weekend, due to both of our busy schedules, we instead opted to train around New Farm. With the great weather, lovely parks and decent stretches of cyclist friendly roads this is an ideal location and we essentially did laps. I had aimed to test some ideas for handle bar mounting of digital still and digital video cameras, but that is likely to need some more thinking next week as the motivation slipped when faced with the simple desire to ride. Rest assured there will be some geeky posts about such a rig when I work it out, as there are plenty of tips online for setups of varying success.

Grabbing our bikes and leaving the technology behind, we simply hit a repeat circle from the Powerhouse car park to the riverwalk at Teneriffe, up onto Commercial Road and across and down James Street before heading along Merthyr Road and down Brunswick to connect to New Farm park again and the Powerhouse. Get all that? The basic circuit here is 6km’s and offers some hills to get the legs pumping and some riverwalk for sprints, pending pedestrians acting as noisy speed bumps. Whilst not as fun as the previous week and without any interesting photos or stories it is a convenient route through a pleasant suburb to focus on as a means to an end. We might go much further afoot next weekend if all goes to plan but for now, a few laps of New Farm will suffice.

Until I work out how best to use the Google XML plugin or some other use of the Googlemaps API, I’ve mapped some of our rides with Mapmyride. I have to say I love the idea of the service but the interface is heavy on advertising where I would prefer a more seamless integration with the end user’s choice of media. Some might argue this ensures greater encouragement of the user community, for instance in the case of FlickR which I use to host all our photographs instead of FTP’ing them to our server directly. I’ll cover those reasons another time but for now, here’s our less than impressive weekend training session, remembering this is a route for laps.