Cooyar Bike Ride – January 2020

Approximate distance 102 kilometres

This was the first lengthy bike ride I’d done for quite sometime – it was going to be one day up, camp over in a national park, and then one day back ~ I ended up just doing the one day and camp, as it turned out to be some of the hardest cycling I’ve done – and I just wasn’t ready for that in a number of ways.

It was still fun though! And the unusual thing about this trip (for me at least) is I filmed it, even just on my mobile phone, but I think it tells the story pretty well. I probably did too much filming in retrospect, but this is the first time I’d ever filmed a cycle trip so there was a lot of experimenting with that, and time consumed I got to admit.

And here’s what it looked like – it was around 102 km’s all up

This was not long after the bushfires, and then a couple of months after this I came down with bronchitis for about 2 months in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic ~ so not much cycling since this trip – but I’m really keen to do some more.

I think this trip showed me you’ve either got to be fully kitted out for all possibilities (which I wasn’t – I didn’t have a tent – I could have just pulled up earlier in the day) — or you’ve got to do it pretty light – eg what they call bikepacking – and maybe that’s what I should do now for a while, until the fitness is back up where it should be and I can do a bigger trip with everything I need for all conditions. But as I said – still fun!

Pretty tired by now – about 5km to Cooyar

And about 8 months later I happened to be in the area again so decided to have a quick look at where I camped..

I was feeling a lot more energetic this time around!