Blog migration

Those wonderful people at road.cc have agreed to publish my blog on the TRAT so I've decided to concentrate on their site rather than try to sustain the same blog in two places.

From now on, therefore, this blog will only be appearing on the road.cc site.

See you there!

Snow joke

Enough with the endless snow already! I've got 167 days to go before I have to cycle an average of 145 miles a day for six days and I haven't been able to cycle so much as 167 yards for weeks thanks to the snow, ice, salt, grit and all that wintry stuff. Actually, that's not quite true - I went out a week ago for a quick ride but all that did was serve to remind me how unfit I am and clog up the bike with clag. I've not been out since.

January was supposed to be all about getting past that horrible post-festive season fitness slump when the slightest exertion brings you out in a toxic sweat and those heady summer days when you feel like you could keep going for weeks seem nothing but a cruel joke. It was supposed to lay the foundations for some serious progress made in February and March, so I could move into spring with a little bit of confidence. That's what this month's supposed to be about, but here we are a third of the way through it and I've spent most of it staring balefully out of the window willing the thaw to begin.

There's always the turbo trainer of course. On paper, the turbo trainer looks like an excellent substitute when the real thing's out of reach. And it is - once I've managed my family's expectations about the availability of our breakfast room for the coming hour or two, and I've tunnelled to the turbo trainer in the back of the coat cupboard, moved 16 pairs of shoes, one vacuum cleaner, three vacuum cleaner attachments, four rucksacks, my bicycle pump, a football and three coats that have fallen off their hooks while I've been wrestling all the other stuff out of the cupboard. Once I've done that it's just a matter of swapping the bike's rear axle for the one supplied with the turbo trainer, finding the mat I put under the bike so the whole house doesn't howl eerily with each pedal stroke, setting the bloody thing up, getting changed, sorting out towel, water and music, and then, finally, getting on and pedalling. For over an hour. Stationary. In my own breakfast room.

Then of course, once I've done my thing and I'm feeling all virtuous, I have to undo everything I've done to set it up, including that exasperating repacking of the coat cupboard, which somehow always seems that bit harder than the unpacking part.

Still, it really is better than nothing I suppose. But come on now, snow! Enough's enough!

We are go

New year, new impetus. Today I moved an inch or two closer to the finish line in two key ways: by going to the gym again (about which more in a moment), and by announcing to the world - or some of the people in my small corner of it - that I'm looking to part them from some of their cash.

Within minutes, a young and glamorous local playboy called Nigel Bailey leapt at the chance to be the first sponsor on my Virgin Money Giving page. Within a few more a devilishly handsome international rock star called Martin Ayrton from somewhere up north where it's grim showed uncommon levels of generosity by pledging a spanking £20! To these two I say thank you very much indeed. I will now leave you in peace until at least May, by which time I'll probably be desperate enough to beg donors for a second shot at their wallets. To the rest of the world I say come on! Let's do this thing!

And so to the gym, where once again today I toiled and sweated and grunted and grimaced like the world-class athlete I am. It might be getting just a tiny bit easier but it's hard to tell because it still feels so unspeakably difficult! It's made me realise how much I've depended on cycling for my fitness for the past few years. Apart from a bit of a swimming fad that came and then went when I realised it was just as likely to aggravate my back as it was to strengthen it, cycling's been pretty much all I've done to keep myself in shape.

It's kind of worked because I'm not particularly lardy and I can cycle a reasonable distance, but I have middle-aged sedentary worker's arms! My shoulders are considerably further forward than they're supposed to be! My wrists are thin, my bum is flat, my chest is saggy and my spare tyre belongs on a Land Rover not a racing bike! But apart from that I'm in great shape.

I bumped into a nice bloke called Matt today. He was on one of the South Downs Way rides I've done (over three days, I hasten to add) and we got on pretty well on the ride until he got a bit bored and left us for dead. But he's young and he's a personal trainer for crying out loud, so I didn't feel too bad. But today as I strained over my feeble rotator cuff swivels he was standing just feet away with dumbbells the size of Quality Street tins (the massive ones you get at Christmas) swinging them around like they were indeed empty Quality Street tins. There's nothing arrogant or macho about him but I confess I felt rather inadequate as he performed his excruciatingly slow perfect press ups that ended with a twist and one arm swinging around to point to the sky (I mean how is that even possible?!)

But, as Matt said when I grunted some self-effacing nonsense about having a long way to go, I just need to keep at it. Little and often. One step at a time. Rome wasn't built in a day. And all that type of stuff.

The challenge gets clearer

Today I went for a tentative ride through the frost and the sludge and the grit and the salt, just to see how much work there is for me to do over the coming weeks - to see how bad things really are.

They're bad. I covered 23 miles at an average speed of 16mph and felt as though I was really pushing myself. It didn't help that I had a stiff, freezing easterly breeze to pedal into on the home straight but that's really neither here nor there. I didn't have any hills to contend with either but I was still completely knackered when I got in.

To put this into perspective, I need to be able to sustain that pace for the entire six days and 874 miles in just six months' time.

I still think I'm capable of it but if there was any small part of me that might have been thinking that this wouldn't be a major fitness challenge, that small part withered and died today. I need to make sure I know exactly what fitness progression the TRAT guys recommend - particularly over the coming month or two - and stick to it religiously. In about a month I'm going to need to be able to cover 70 miles at this pace without killing myself ignominiously in front of my fellow TRAT riders - and if the fear of ignominious death doesn't keep me going on those training runs I don't know what will.

On the plus side, my rather tasty new satnav unit worked a treat today, giving me the same speeds, times and averages as my little bike computer, but also simultaneously plotting (and saving) my course and making all sorts of other calculations I've not even got my head around yet. I think this will be an invaluable training tool - not to mention a handy thing to have for the ride itself.

It's one of these Garmin Dakota 20s (pictured) - as recommended to me by a nice fella at the Cycle Show in October - he was wearing a Garmin shirt, funnily enough. The instructions, which don't come in printed form but as a PDF on a CD (yeuch!), are hopeless but luckily it's reasonably intuitive so after a small amount of head-scratching and screen prodding I've actually managed to make it do something vaguely relevant for me. I'm so impressed with my own geekery that I can hardly speak.