Burning All That Excess Energy

*stretches*

Alright, we're nearing the end of the first week of November, the NaNoWriMo month. Incidentally, remember remember the fifth of November. It is a day after the gazetted public holiday, but for someone who is on sabbatical, it is a day that is no different from any other day.

Well, scratch that. I had this weird amount of energy that I felt like burning off, and so I pumped my tyres back to the 80/100 psi for the front and rear tyres respectively, strapped on my integrated GPS receiver/heart rate monitor, and went cycling around the North Easatern Riverine Loop once more. Not much has changed since the last time that I cycled through it in September, but it was still a treat to go down some familiar paths.

I mean, that circuit has undergone various works over the past five years, among which included:

1. Re-paving the tarmac along Punggol Promenade Nature Walk;
2. Raising the height limits on some of the overhead barriers;
3. Repainting the PCN lane to split up the pedestrians from the cyclists;
4. Re-repainting the PCN lane to re-integrate the pedestrains and cyclists;
5. Re-re-repainting the PCN lane to demarcate ``PMDs must use this lane'';
6. Improvements to the shelters surrounding;
7. Upgrading of various paths to make sure bends are actually safe to take at the 10--25 km/h speed (I'm looking at you, old 90° turn opposite ``Coney Island'');
8. Better lighting; and
9. Updated crossing at Seletar North Link.

New construction works, unfortunately, were still unavoidable, but man I'm too lazy to list them down---just take my word for it that they exist.

All in all, it was a good cycling round. My heart rates were uncomfortably high though, generally falling into the VO₂ Max and Anaerobic heart rate zones---those two took up more than 83% of my total cycling time of about an hour.

Uhhh...

...I would like to say that the sensor might be busted, but I did get some thumping headaches on the left side of my head. I suspect that it is due to the twin reasons of probably going a little hard [after not having done anything this hard in a long time], and partly due to possible dehydration. I was supposed to drink like 250 mL of water before heading out, but I only realised that I forgot to do so only when I was already on the ground floor, ready to go.

I could have gone back up for that water, but since the elevator is currently out of commission due to upgrade works (only done near the end of November!), I just decided to heck it and go. It probably didn't help that the weather was generally humid and hot at eleven in the morning.

It was so humid that just minutes after I put away my bicycle at home and had taken a shower, it rained. Hard.

I am going to sleep really well tonight, I think.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. A pity I can't/won't use any of these blog entries as part of my NaNoWriMo word count due to the principle of the matter; otherwise my word count is probably going to be some 50% larger than the 12880 words that it is right now.

Till the next update.