Endless flashing lights merge to create a blinking-red glow, silhouetted against a darkened-blue sky. There's a yawning, emerging energy steadily giving rise to elaborate swaying and building of a multi-coloured mass. Riders arrange and rearrange, constant streams of people with bikes, moving, shifting, restraining, nervous. If you concentrate and trace the minutiae of the mass, the pulsing and flashing reveals the everyday machinations of cycling life; intricate lines of bikes being walked - hopeful - to starting points, riders stretching, massaging, attempting to warm chilled muscles; heat through friction...

"Can you get this insect out of my eye?" It sounds like some grand philosophical statement, with untold symbolism, metaphor and interpretive meaning, but, for a cyclist in training, it is one of the many factors to contend with.

I download the Peaks Challenge Intermediate volume training program from the Bicycle Network website. I figure I need to start somewhere and a professional training program has to be a better option than simply watching Rocky training montages...

I had a plan. Well, as part of my Peaks training, I had a few plans. It is Week 7 of 16 weeks training and although I still have some serious training to do, I want to see if I can ride the Peaks distance - that is, see if I can clock the 200 kilometre mark - and see how I feel with the elevation - over 4,000 metres of climbing...