Bit tight for time with domestic responsibilities, but squeezed in 12 miles on the bike. Still aching quite a bit, but hopefully manage further tomorrow…..

…well thats my excuse for 2 more ‘rest days’. I did ache a lot, so I’m not sure that running last Thursday was such a good idea. Hopefully that was just coincidence. Anyway the rain and gales had abated this morning (Sunday) and the sun was shining so I set off on my bike for a gentle jaunt. 17 uneventful miles round local lanes at an average 12.7 mph. Hopefully the sort of pace we’ll maintain during the trip. Just got to go 6 times as far( every day)  without slowing down then, eh?. Hmmmm……..

Being the weekend I thought I should really get out on my bike, alas sadly all I managed today was a walk to the local Sainsbury’s. Still it was exercise wasn’t it? … My excuse of eating bad things is also starting to wear a bit thin now, today I have probably consumed more calories than Chris Moyles does in an average week. Tomorrow I am starting a diet, no more sugary things is the diet, stodgey starchy things are still ok but absolutely no chocolate & sweets. I’m replacing those with fruit.

I’ve done it, two weeks since I started cycling to work and I’ve bagged 160 miles in training. As of next week I have to do it without bank holidays as cusioning so I’ll be up to 100 miles a week. I seem to be getting fitter but progress seems slow, I’m still getting very tired come the evening and have little energy to do anything more than just vegitate in front of the telly.

Taken me a week since getting the OK ,to pluck up courage and attempt a run. Almost 14 months since my back went after a run, and it showed! Following instructions I ran 2 mins, walked 2 mins, ran again etc.. Once I’d mastered the one leg in front of the other thing, it went OK. 2 mins at a time was plenty…. So far so good, the back doesn’t ache any more than it did beforehand.

24mins running, 22 mins walking, 4 miles in total 

I’m sorry it has taken so long but I’ve finally blogged. My work ethic seems to have ignored my life needs, but hey we’ll address that later, and let’s not get any psychotherapists excited about any of my ‘issues’.

I wrote a training plan at Christmas but have achieved only half of my goals thus far. According to the schedule I should be doing forty miles twice a week, but I’d be lucky to get one session of twenty in, let alone doing four times that. Still we are gaining hours of light by the day and I’ll soon get in the groove.

Most of my training has been indoors with the cross trainer, hoovering, lifting cans of lager and opening wine bottles amongst other key life critical activities, its cold outside and it gets cold and wet outside and it often gets colder and wetter outside.Don’t get me wrong, I have done some proper stuff too, I’ve been swinging about in tree’s, chasing lawnmower’s and I’ve been working on equipment pricing etc, but I do need to knuckle down, and get some serious mileage in.

The last twenty mile burn resulted in a bike overhaul with new pedal plates and some serious language encouragement. That aside, I am still very excited about the forthcoming adventure and will post another blog soon.

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

…and time to get back on the bike after a 5 day break. Seemed to have lots of aches and pains after the last chiropracter session and had somehow strained my chest. Must have overdone the ‘dead bug’ exercise!. A nice steady 16 miles on Tuesday got the legs going and made me feel a bit better.

On Wednesday went for a bit more. Attached the bottle carrier and a flask of coffee to my bike and set off for Wickham and the Meon Valley Railway track. A bit chilly, but fairly pleasant when I left. Several hours later, arrived back home, frozen stiff and plastered from head to toe in mud! Knew there was a likelihood of ‘drizzle’ later on, but hoped to beat it. I didn’t!. I hadn’t banked on the hail & sleet though…….

Still, 35 miles on the training log.  The thought of doing 3 times that distance daily for nearly a fortnight is starting to seem pretty scary!

As David worked so hard, I felt it necessary to balance things out a bit by doing precisely zero training. the excuses are having to wait in for a parcel delivery and numerous aches and pains from yesterdays chiropracter session. As compensation I walked 3 miles tonight (to the pub & back, train crew reunion…..) but don’t suppose that really counts?

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