Easter Weekend: Ton Up + Perkins

Feb 2019
Thought it would be nice to go over some of my old blog posts, so will revisit them from time to time.

Here is the first.. my first ever 100 mile ride on a lovely Easter weekend that coincided with a new arrival in our household.

Good old Perkins...

PS ,, poor old Bailey after the fun of chasing Mephie Perkins put him firmly in his place. Even though he was ancient Perkins was still full of spirit and had the occasional bit of fun by assaulting Bailey with no provocation.....

April 2006
Took advantage of the long Easter weekend to go for a couple of long rides. On my tour I plan to average 130km per day so on Saturday I went on a loop of Salisbury/Marlborough that was just over 130k. Felt fine Sunday so on Monday, fortified by plentiful Easter eggs, simnel cake and roast beef & lamb dinner I decided to try for the ton (in terms of miles). Was lucky with the weather, sunny most of the day though with a bit of a westerly breeze. But coped with the ride fine, managing 168km or 105 miles. Also took in some of the hills around and about so did around 1300m of climbing as well. Felt really good on the ride and celebrated with some pints at the Lamb pub (sort of appropriate for the season).

Still feeling fine today, put this down in part to the fact I forced myself to take it easy for the ride yesterday. I averaged 23kph and especially relaxed on the last 30 minutes of the ride, keeping my heart rate below 120 and often below 105. I think this makes a big difference in terms of how easy the day after a long ride feels.


Other major event of the weekend was on Sunday when we went to see a cat up for adoption at our local cat shelter. We are near a busy road so are quite limited in choice of cats for homing. We have an outside cat run but this is not big enough for an active outdoor moggy so we ideally would have an indoor cat. Perkins was suggested to us as, though he is an outdoor cat, he is getting on in years, 15 to be exact and so should be happy with the house and cat run. He is quite different from our old cat Mephi, who died earlier this year, who was an almost black siamese cross. Perkins is hairy, piebald white and black and will be arriving shortly. Main item of interest will be how he gets on with Bailey our dog. Time will tell...