Cycling Anniversary

As of next week (Tuesday 14th September to be exact) I will have been cycling to work for 1 year.  This has been a huge change to my lifestyle and opinion of exercise not to mention a huge change to the size of my butt.  I used to struggle to fit any sort of activity into my daily life and dragged myself down to the gym, out jogging or slapped on a DVD at home with a mardy face and lots of grumbling.  It never lasted, I’d start each year, month, week, day with a resolution to get fit and may even have stuck to it for a while but I always reverted to my couch-potato self.

A new job and a cycle-to-work scheme (plus a rather over-active boyfriend) convinced me that I should get a bike and start to cycle the 4 miles to my local train station twice a day.  I got the bike in September (obviously) just when the summer had ended and the evenings (and eventually mornings) started getting darker which didn’t make the prospect of cycling up the massive hills an exciting one.  I used to dread cycling, I would think of any excuse not to pull on the lycra in the mornings.  I used to sit on the train home anxiously staring at the sky willing it not to rain.  This attitude didn’t get better as winter started. 

The icy roads and eventually heaps of snow stopped my cycling for 5 weeks over Christmas, but mid-January I braved the roads again.  This time around the mornings started getting lighter and warmer, the hills became easier and I started to enjoy my 20 minutes in the morning to see Spring waking everything up.  By the time summer came around I pulled on the old lycra without even thinking about it.  On the odd days when I did drive to the station I felt guilty and quite lardy and couldn’t wait to cycle again.

All this exercise (3 hours of cycling and 2 hours of running a week - ish) has toned me up and helped me to lose about a stone (6kgs) without really changing my diet.  I’m amazed that I’ve done it, I’m even more amazed that I enjoy it and I hope to carry it on with longer runs and maybe even a cycle or two at the weekends.  The moral of the story is, if I can do it anyone can :-)