New Years Resolution - Starting Cycling Again

One of my new year's resolutions was to start cycling to the train station again after a long and snowy winter break.  The snow started in November in Reading and I promptly stopped cycling the 4 miles there and back to our local train station as soon as it got a little icy.  I have visions of myself skidding round a corner on ice unable to release my feet and leaving parts of my knees on the tarmac behind me :-)  I had already stopped running, pretty much after my 10k race in October, so that meant I was doing no exercise at all.  This is bad and usually means by weight shoots up as I carry on eating the doughnuts and cake needed to fuel my non-existent activities.  But this winter it didn't, I didn't consciously eat less or change my diet but my weight stayed about the same regardless of my slobiness.

 

As the snow melted and the icy mornings became few and far between I knew I had to crawl onto my bike again otherwise I never would.  The first few days were very difficult, the hills seemed bigger and even the flat sections seemed arduous.  After about a week of solid cycling (the weather couldn't make up it's mind whether it was warm or freezing so this meant a few weeks of cycling one or two days only), I was back into my old gears of the previous winter.  Now, after cycling consistently for four weeks, I am probably back to my old self.  This bodes well for my next new year's resolution of starting to run regularly again in March (when the clocks go forwards) which I suspect will be tougher and bit more of a shock than this has been.

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 :-)

One more off the bucket list?

I've been cycling 3.5 (each way) miles to the train station for the past 3 weeks and I've noticed a definite improvement in my fitness. The hills are much easier but I'm still puffed when I get to the top, I'm even doing them in 2nd gear instead of the lowest. Logistically it's working too, I get to work at about 8:15am (or 8:45am if I catch the later train) then have a quick shower and back to my desk to start working. Downsides are my entire office gets to see me in lycra, I sit on a train for 40 minutes being sweaty and I have two showers a day which is very drying.

My swimming is coming along too, I've mastered front crawl breathing every other stroke, now I'm working on breathing every 3 strokes (so alternate sides) with the help of a nose clip (and Pete). My next goal is to be able to swim 4 lengths in a row, currently I can do just about 2.

Tomorrow I'm starting a new diet called Zest4Life which is run by nutritionists. A girl at work is a trained nutritionist and is starting to run these classes, so she needs volunteers to do a dry run. It's a 4 week trial which happily covers my 'Detox for a month' life goal. The diet is more about eating healthily (low GI) not reducing calories specifically, so lots of vegetables, fruit and natural stuff. Tea is restricted to one cup a day, so I'll be switching to fruit teas at work and chocolate is 100g a week, so a big reduction there. I'm hoping it will teach me more about food options and get me cooking again.

Talking about cooking, I've bought a slow cooker! Tomorrow I'll be treating Pete to slow cooked leg of lamb and during the week I'll do a chicken and tomato effort. Our eating habits aren't great, Pete tends to eat when he gets home from work as he trains later in the evening. By the time I get home, he's eaten and generally on his way out which means we both cook and eat separately during the week. However, if I set the cooker off in the morning and Pete turns it off when he gets home, we'll both eat the same thing but at different times.

My first evening class was this week, I'm doing an Introduction to Counselling at Bracknell for 10 weeks. I really enjoyed it, the other students are lovely and the teacher is very good. I'm really looking forwards to studying again and will probably go on to do the next course which is a year and more commitment.