Today is day 7 of my cycling to work ‘experiment’ and I can safely say it’s going rather well. I do have the odd thought about hopping on a tube and I do get extremely tired in the evenings and slob out infront of the telly. However it has its benefits, take today, it was sunny, relatively mild, a day I’d much rather be out doors than stuck on a stinky tube. Some benefits I probably shouldn’t admit to are that I now eat what ever I like without feeling guilty, the odd fried breakfast, a mars bar at lunch, a pizza after work. Maybe a McDonalds thrown in at the weekend, its all good. So my anticipated weight loss isn’t going quite to plan but I feel a lot better.

I noticed that today’s nice weather brought out the ‘occasional’ cyclists who normally tube in but when the weather’s nice they hop on their bike. It was actually a little congested in places with so many bikes on the road. The ‘occasional’ cyclists are the ‘L’ plate drivers of the cycling world, slow and lacking in confidence.

My cycle log is now up at 60miles (in the last 7 days). By tomorrow evening I will have hit the 80mile mark. 20miles a day seems a long way off from cycling 100miles in a day but its a start.

For this mornings cycle check out this link

 http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=119315

So today is the third day I have cycled to and fro the office. By now I would have normally given up so it is going well. Today I had an interview for a different role at work, it briefly crossed my mind whether cycling in on such a day was wise. Of course my training regime was top priority so I decided against disrupting it. As one doesn’t generally wear a suit while cycling either I decided against anything too smart (I didn’t expect it to be a necessary requirement anyway). In my defence though I did iron a shirt which I delicately shoved in my ruck sack. Not only was today interview day but also 9 O’Clock meeting day, which to most people is the normal time they arrive at work. At the beeb, people tend to rock in anytime between 9 and 10 depending on where they live and what time they plan to leave. I personally find it really hard to make it in for 9 so generally make it in around 9.30. As I’d already broke the habit of a life time of getting out of bed before 7.30 by cycling to work in the first place I now had to leave the house by 7.30 to make it for the meeting. I actually made it, a momentous achievement for me.

Having now tried a handful of different routes between E8 and W12 I have now decided to stick with one main route to save myself from getting lost as frequently as I have been. I’m still finding the return journey the hardest, both mentally and physically. Perhaps I could put it down to the darkness or the many one way systems but I find it a lot harder to keep to the route on the way back, things also look a lot different when your facing the other way. Yesterday was quite eventful, I got lost near the Chinese embassy and witnessed a protest against the chinese overreaction in Tibet.

This journey was GPS’ed, along with some pictures of the protest… I’ve been having trouble with the GPS and sometimes it’s plotting gets a bit wild, as you’ll see from this link it reckoned I had cycled nigh on 20 miles on the route home. My getting lost certainly increased the distance but not by that much. I think I know the reason so hopefully this won’t happen again. Link below:

GPS mucked up route, but has pictures

It would seem logical to most that if you are deciding to cycle a reasonable distance to your place of work through roads you’ve rarely if ever trodden that you might want to test out the route prior to attempting it for real. Yes this is a logical persons approach, me, nah.. takes the fun out of it.

You can review the mistakes I made on the link below:

http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=107525