Day Four - Field Camp to Dodoma

Distance: 109km

Ride time: 5:02

Climb: 520m

Best shuffled song: The Last Song by the Foo Fighters

Fourth day of dirt. As Marcel put it, today was more a cyclocross dirt day than a mountain bike dirt day. For me this great. Most of the day was pretty relaxing. Good hard packed dirt on the main road. A couple of fun sidetracks to be found.

A still feel like I am not quite over being sick. I am definitely not feeling any of the symptoms that I had before, so I can eat food and sleep now. But I haven't got back much bike fitness. Every day, I feel a bit better, and can push for a bit longer in the morning. Taking it a bit easy in the morning would seem like the sensible thing to do, but I kind of worry that I would just get used to riding slower all the time. I'd rather suffer a bit in the middle part of the ride (the last part is always awesome) and work on getting a bit fast again. That's my plan anyway. The other guy that got ESS is taking the opposite approach - ramping up slowing - so we can compare recoveries. He has a lot further to climb back up than me though. He is dangerously skinny from the sickness and then his summit attempt on Kilimanjaro.

No mangoes for lunch today. The new Indaba guy, G, took the trouble to shout out "No mangoes at lunch today mate" as he went by in the lunch truck. I guess that eating 6 mangoes in one go makes quite an impression.

Training for RAAM Eric and I went looking for some fresh fruit in Dodoma. We tried a couple of places, but the mangoes weren't anything on the mangoes from yesterday. Eric ended up getting some little mangoes and avocados. He is counting of getting a lot of calories from avocados. Seems smart. As well as fresh fruit, we got some Tanzanian style fast food. I ordered a hotdog by pointing at the sausages then saying "bun". The guy was nodding his head and saying "yes, bun" so I thought that we were both on the same page. Turns out not. I just got a couple of sausages on a place. They were actually pretty good though. I followed up by ordering some chips. This turned out to be a mistake. The guy had run out of charcoal for his grill, so he had to send out for some. By the time that arrived, and he'd fried (not deep fried) the chips, I kind of felt like all my prime relaxing time had been spent.

Dan's Camping Tip: When you are checking into your hotel, make sure that you get a room with air-conditioning. Fans can't battle equatorial humidity.