Back on the bike

For the first time in over a year, I got back on my road bike and went out with my Tuesday group.

Eek, that was a mistake! My level of fitness has gone markedly down, and I could only keep up with the group at 25km/hour for the first 12kms - I just got dropped.

I ended up doing 44km on Tues - 10 there, 10 back, and the 12km out & back loop. I really miss my heart rate monitor, though I was able to use mapmyride on the android (wow, smartphones with gps are freaking awesome).
Weirdly, the stats show me getting faster on average every time I rode, though to be fair the ride home was 90% downhill.

I think that I'm going to put in a bit of effort this time around though. I used to be playing touch football, cycling 25-30km 5 times a week + a 50km extra ride on Tuesdays.

In my teens, I had free weights and a boxing bag; plus I'd walk to and from school (10km a day). The boxing bag was pretty neat (it looked a bit like this boxing bag), because the more you did it the faster you became. It felt as though I could actually feel my brain rewiring itself to make my ability to punch quickly a fluid thing.

So, if I'm going to give this a shot I might focus not just on the bike fitness, but on a different style of training. My friend Robby and ex-boss Brett had a huge focus on Kettlebells, Robby did a lot of circus style training too. Add to that Christina's really pushing herself with her pole fitness - she's small, but has quite a lot of strength given her size - and I've got quite a selection of people I can turn to in order to get started.

The only question is what's going to be more worthwhile? Cardio or strength? Do I just turn one room of my house into a funky climbing wall room? Should I just load up of sports accessories, things which give me oodles of metrics (I really did like my polar heart rate monitor); so that as I get fit I also get data?

Or should I just focus on cycling purely, and build it back up until I can hang with the group at 32km/h for 50km+?