It's cooled down a bit since a couple of weeks ago, when the humidity and heat in our office approached the ridiculous. It was too hot to be working we thought as we swapped trousers for shorts, shoes for flipflops and coffee for an almost constant supply of ice cream.
Trust Phil Marland and Tony Ireland (on route to the 2010 Cape Epic) to put things into perspective for us. 4 hours spent on a turbo trainer in a very hot tent in Surrey is pretty much guaranteed to seperate the men from the boys...
This is Tony's report:
On Sat 27
Jun 09 Phil and I completed another stage of our Epic Ride event at the Royal
Logistic Corps (RLC) Open day held in Deepcut, Surrey. During the show we completed a 4 hour ride,
however for this event we would not be clocking up the mileage as we were
seated on spinning bikes and would therefore be stationary throughout the
ride.
So how would we monitor our
progress?
Today’s aim was not distance,
but calories; to be more specific, burning calories.
The challenge was for Phil and I to burn as many calories as
possible in the four hours. Throughout
the ride visitors to the show exchanged cash for figures as they attempted to
guess our final calorie count.
Our
challenge was supported not only by TREDZ, but generous donations from the
Silver Stars Parachute Training Centre, Podium Sports, Green-Oil UK and
Cotswold Outdoor ensured that the winners could look forward to some great
prizes with the winner being thrown out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft at
12’000’ for a tandem sky dive.
The
temperature inside our TREDZ team tent soared to 30 degrees to ensure that
every minute of our four hours in the saddle was soaked in sweat as we
attempted to maintain heart rate in excess of 80 – 90% keeping our calorific
expenditure at its peak.
For those
that have not had the misfortune of experiencing a lengthy period of time sat
upon a spinning bike, trust me, the minutes do not exactly fly by, especially
if you feel like you are sat in a green-house!
It quickly became apparent that dehydration would be a real issue,
between us Phil and I downed almost 8 litres of SIS Go each to try and keep the
cramps at bay.
Eventually the time
ticked away and our task was done, but how did we fare?
Between us
we expended a total of 7026 calories and raised almost £500 for our charities,
the Army Benevolent Fund and Help for Heroes.
