Friday, June 08, 2012

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+?




1 comment:

James Smith said...

FOCUS bikes stands for innovative technology and design, and we pride ourselves on being at the focal point of these qualities. Our bicycles are developed and continually improved up by a precision team of German engineers, scientists, professional cyclists, designers and technicians. Want to buy Focus Bikes ??