No bike son, you gotta work late

So, as you know if you've been reading this blog, it is currently prohibited to move around my work campus on a bicycle. In fact, it has always been the case but, until very recently, it was one of that type of rule which is quite common in Spain, one that you can basically ignore. The current state of affairs is that they will allow me in to the campus on the bike, provided I go straight to the gym and do not attempt to reach the office bikewise. You have to fight these rules like-for-like: just as there is no name behind the decision, I am contesting it by pulling some strings behind the scenes. So far I have been told on good authority that there will be a "solution" in September. This rather begs the question, what kind of solution can there be other than the obvious, immediate one of just simply letting us ride our bikes on campus again?

Today my heart skipped a beat as it occurred to me that the reason they are resurfacing the road might just be that they are going to put a bike lane! Could it really be? That would be quite simply awesome. It would also have the result of forcing the cars to go in slightly narrower lanes which would give the added benefit of reducing their speed and it being more likely that they stuck to the 40kph speed limit. The punishment for speeding on campus is very severe, much worse than a fine or points on your license: they may banish you to the outside world by taking away your parking space, thus adding a lot of hassle (to the tune of about an hour a day) to your life.

When something is too good to be true...

...it's often simply NOT. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this advert

As you can see, it's a pretty good deal €1,650 for about €5,000 of ex-demo bike. I was so excited that I didn't even notice until much later the laughably bad Spanish in the advert (Giant Trinity Advanced was translated literally as "Gigante Avancado de Trinidad"). I was sure it must have sold already at that price and I was kicking myself for not having googled "giant advanced trinity madrid" or "gigante avancado de trinidad" for that matter. You can imagine my delight when I got an email to say that it was still on offer but he didn't answer my question about whether the seat post had already been cut, instead saying it had only ever been used on asphalt roads... This got me very suspicious - who would ride such a beauty on anything but an asphalted road? So I googled his email address (joseluisjimenez1974@hotmail.com) and a number of forum topics popped up in everything from saxophones to mountain bikes, all of which were warning of a con. Amazingly he hadn't bothered to change his email address. It's actually just possible that he is really called José Luis Jiménez and was born in 1974 although I would expect his Spanish to be much better.

So then I got this reply, which was identical to the ones that had appeared on the forums:

hola, mi novia es inglesa y vivimos aqui en inglaterra. quiero vender la bicicleta en espana porque la tengo desde alli, fue comprada en espana y tengo los documentos y la garantia desde alli. si quieres comprar yo te la puedo enviar con una mensajeria pero no voy a hacer contrembolso porque hace unas semanas antes, un comprador me dijo que me va a comprar la bicicleta y que solo va a usar contrembolso, yo acepte porque soy una persona de palabra, he enviado la bicicleta a el pero cuando la empresa fue en su direccion para entregarlo, sorpresa, nadie abrio la puerta y su telefono fue siempre cerrado, la empresa ha intentado durante varios dias pero nada. y asi yo he pagado los gastos de envio para mandar la bicicleta y tambien para recibirla devuelta. yo soy un hombre serio, tengo 37 anos, un hermoso restaurante aqui en londres y creame que para mi el tiempo es muy precioso. te digo del principio que la bicicleta no tiene ningun defecto ocultado ( se puede ver en las fotos del anuncio), lo compre nueva, fue usado solo varias veces, tengo factura de compra, creame que la vendo solo porque no la uso mas, trabajo mucho y no tengo tiempo. si quieres comprarla vamos a utilizar una empresa de envios que yo he utilizado antes y creo que es bastante buena para envios internationales porque tienen gastos de envio muy aceptable. ellos tienen un servicio muy practico para las compra-ventas por internet que yo he usado antes y fue muy satisfecho. ellos trabajan asi:
- yo te voy a enviar la bicicleta como usted quieres, envios normal (7-10 dias) o envios express (3-4 dias) cuando usted estas listo para comprarla;
- despues la paqueteria se pondra en contacto con usted con los detalles sobre envio y sobre como debes hacer el pago;
- usted vas a hacer el pago a la empresa de envio;
- despues, usted vas a recibir la bicicleta y tienes 3 dias para comprobarla y decidir si vas a guardarla;
- si estas contento y quieres guardarla entonces usted vas a mandar la confimacion la empresa, yo voy a recibir el pago y todo esta hecho.
- en en caso que por algun razon no quieres guardar la bicicleta, no te gusta o por cualquier otro razon, usted vas a recibir el pago devuelta inmediatamente y yo tambien la bicicleta, pero yo conosco mi bici y estoy seguro vas a guardarla.
asi mi companero, si estas deacuerdo con todo por favor mandame los datos para el envio, nombre, direccion, ciudad, codigo postal, numero de telefono y si estas preparado manana mismo voy a preparar la bicicleta para el envio. tambien necesito saber como quieres el envio, por express o envios normal. si prefieres el envio normal, yo voy a pagar los gastos de envio. lo siento que te escribo tanto, pero necesito un cliente serio para vender la bicicleta. espero requesta. gracias

The sheer length of it would have been enough to ring a few warning bells. As I can't be bothered to translate it myself and it is Googlespanish anyway, here it is Google translated back into English:

hello, my girlfriend is English and live here in England. I want to sell the bike in spain because I have from there, was purchased in Spain and I have the documents and the guarantee from there. if you buy me I can send you the courier with but I will not do because it contrembolso few weeks ago, a buyer told me that I will buy the bike and will only use contrembolso, I accepted because I am a man of my word I sent the bike to him but when the company was in the delivery address, surprise, no one opened the door and his phone was always closed, the company has tried for several days but nothing. and so I paid the cost of shipping the bike and also to receive back. I am a serious man, I have 37 years, a fine restaurant here in London and believe me that my time is very precious. I say the principle that the bike has no hidden defect (seen in photos of the ad), buy it new, it was used only several times, I have proof of purchase, believe that the band just because they use it more, work and I have much time. if you want to buy we will use a shipping company I have used before and I think it's good enough for shipping internationales shipping because they are very acceptable. they have a very practical service for buying and selling online that I've used before and was very satisfied. They work like this:- I'm going to send the bike as you want, normal delivery (7-10 days) or express shipping (3-4 days) when you're ready to buy;- After the parcel will contact you with details on shipping and how you make the payment;- You're going to make payment to the shipping company;- Then you're going to get the bike and you have 3 days to check and decide whether to keep it;- If you are happy and want to save then you'll send the confimacion the company, I'm going to get paid and everything is done.- On if for some reason do not want to put your bike, you do not like or any other reason, you'll get paid immediately and I also returned the bike, but I conosco my bike and I'm sure you save it.so my companion, if they agree with all please send me the data for shipping, name, address, city, zip code, telephone number and your readiness tomorrow I'm going to prepare the bike for shipping. also need to know how you want the shipment by express or regular delivery. if you prefer the normal shipping, I'll pay the shipping. I'm sorry I write so much, but I need a serious customer to sell the bike. I hope request. thanks

If you can't be bothered to read that either - and I don't blame you - the point is that the bike isn't in Madrid after all. If you stop and think for a minute, you would probably never have responded to a second hand advert in another country (unless it was via some website of international repute like ebay). Here's the rub: you pay a (what turns out to be bogus) shipping company to ship the bike to you and then you can track your delivery on a (bogus) website... What I'm not clear about is whether you get conned for just the shipping charge or for the price of the bike (plus the shipping). I guess he has two versions of the con, one for really desperate and gullible people and another for the more wary. Even if he just gets €75 a pop, it's not bad business considering he has very low overheads. Also it's too small an amount for anyone to really bother about trying to claw back - I expect most people would be too embarrassed even to try. 

I gave him the following address but evidently his Spanish was better than I had been expecting because I didn't hear from him again...

          Calle Atomarporculo, 34

          Gilipollasdemierda 28667

          Madrid

          Spain 

In his message he says that he is a very busy man and that his time is very precious - it's a shame that he has no respect for anyone else's time (or money). Being a good upstanding citizen and all that, I sent an email to the website which had published the advert to warn them that it was a con and that there were likely many others by the same person. Of course I didn't hear anything back from them.

Tattoo envy

I was just perusing a triathlon forum when I came across a post by someone showing off their latest tattoo with lots of very complementary replies. I was amazed to see that it was the tattoo that I had designed for myself by the awesome artist Steven Barrett but then bottled out of having inked. I feel a bit strange to think that it could have been my leg in the photo below because it does look pretty cool, but also I suppose it would have pissed me off if I had had it done to see that someone else had copied it (actually, the final design had a cap on the runner - I didn't like to be reminded of my encroaching hair loss)... On the other hand, I'm happy that it has gone to a good home, so to speak!

Ceci n'est pas ma jambe

 At the weekend we went to a park with water slides and I couldn't help noticing just how many people had tattoos. I'm convinced that about two out of every three adults had one, and that was only counting those that were in visible places. There were some striking ones, of course, but mostly they just seemed to be random drawings that were unlikely to have a life changing significance for their bearers; I almost found myself respecting more the old school "Mum" or "Wife's name here" tattoos which at least mean something. I don't want to come across all snooty and elitist - and maybe that's just what I am being - but I have to say, I was quite glad that I wasn't wearing a tattoo myself.

Why it's important to keep a training log

Today I received a speeding ticket with photographic evidence. It was dated the 18th of March (quite why it takes 4 months to arrive - in which time you could have racked up quite a number of them - is beyond me) so it was hard to remember who was driving that day, and it wasn't possible to make anything out from the photo of course. My wife was quite convinced that it was me driving that day and I was quite convinced that it was her. In the end there were no points only a fine to be paid so it is really only an intellectual quibbling point but I was pleased to be able to pull out my training log and prove beyond all doubt that it hadn't been me: that day I had gone to work running...

By the way, the location of the speed camera that caught her was just by the headquarters of DGT (la Dirección General de Tráfico), the very same people who issue the speeding tickets.

What's the point?

I don't know why I have bothered doing all this Ironman training for an event which takes place after the end of the World on the 21st of May (shit, that's tomorrow!).

A number of weeks ago I noticed an incredibly cheesey billboard by the side of the road on one of my rides and made a mental note to look it up. It looked like the sort of thing a mate might knock up in his lunch break on his computer, except that it was blown up to gigantic proportions. Of course, by the time I got home, tired, I forgot and since then it's been replaced by another advert after their funding presumably ran out. It's only now that I've seen the news (where have I been you ask?) that I remember that it said something about the 21st of May and something about "Family Radio" but it was the fact that whatever it was was "guaranteed by the Bible" that really caught my attention. Now I see that this is in response to an 89 year old man, Harold Camping, who believes that Jesus Christ will rise up on this day and "rapture" the true-believers to Heaven. Sounds quite pleasant but the question is, what happens to the true non-believers and will I have time to do my three hour cycle ride beforehand or not? I had to actually look up the word "rapture" to make sure my understanding of it was right - it's hardly a word you use everyday - how is it that there are so many words that are essentially religious duplicates of other, perfectly acceptable words (e.g., right / righteous, wrong / sin, etc.)?

I'm actually genuinely surprised that this prediction has gained any traction in conservative Spain: the Catholic Church is not really the sort of fickle Institution that would be given to such dabblings in clairvoyance. Or seen another way, it's not really in their interest for people to know that Harold Camping got the news before the Pope, who supposedly has a direct line to the Almighty One.

Well, I don't know about the end of the World but it's certainly true that the website where you can find out all about it has already collapsed. We're doomed I tell you! Doomed!

Been there, done that, got the tattoo

This is not my leg

I've always liked the idea of having a tattoo but I've never really known of what. Now I can't get the idea out of my head of having a tattoo to celebrate the Brazil Ironman supposing, that is, that I finish it. Unfortunately the Ironman logo is pretty awful but the tattoo would have to include that for it to have meaning.

Why the hell do I want to get a tattoo? It's not to brag, honest (remember the slogan for the Ironman: "Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life); I want to make this permanent. Been there, done that, got the tattoo and, no, I'm not going to do it again. I can't imagine doing a tattoo for a Marathon, for example, because then as soon as you run one faster, you're going to regret that tattoo. But an Ironman is an Ironman, there is a definite before and after: you are one or you are not. This is something I'm going to be proud of when I'm 99 (if I make it that far) even if it is a bit ugly and unfashionable in the year 2,071.

I've taken the first step towards actually getting inked and that is to start a competition on the 'net for the design that I will use. Digging around on the internet I found hundreds of tattoos, many of which have been compiled by this guy (who, coincidentally is also preparing for Ironman Brazil, but next year):

http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2009/01/im-tattoos.html
http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2009/08/im-tattoos-ironman-tattoo-designs-ii.html

http://mauriciosegura.blogspot.com/2011/02/im-tattoos-ironman-tattoo-designs-iii.html

If you want to have a crack at designing my tattoo then click here and you could win $100, not to mention have the honour of being the creator of something I'll wear for the rest of my life... ;-)

Happy birthday to me!

Yes, it's my birthday, not my blog's birthday or anything silly like that. How things have changed in the last few years... I got a two piece tri racing suit as my main present and I am crossing my fingers for the New York Marathon lottery draw which is any day now. I have to say, one good thing about triathlon and Marathons is that now I'm looking forward to being 40 next year, when I'll be competing as the youngest in my age group...

Last year I spent my birthday in Paris (no, wait, it wasn't like that...). It was the time of the volcanic ash cloud that caused aeronautical chaos all over Europe. A couple of work colleagues and I managed to get to Paris on the Eurostar, arriving at the hotel late in the evening, and then we had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch the first plane to fly out of Paris for about a week. So it wasn't exactly a romantic candle lit dinner celebration. This year we will be driving five hours to Asturias....

Desk fit

If you are an office worker serious about triathlon then you should consider getting your desk set up properly.

A triathlete never misses a training opportunity...

Rowing in the 90's

I've been wondering for some time now, how my training now compares with the training I did back in the days when I was rowing. I dug up some old documents I had stored away in a file in the 90s. I was surprised to see that the philosophy wasn't so different from now. This is an example of how the British rowing squad / hopefuls were training back then: the training we did in the Oxford University squad was similar given that there were several Olympic gold medalists in the team and we all had to do the same training because we were literally in the same boat. I find it funny to see that we were supposed to be doing most of our training at some kind of aerobic pulse rate because none of us actually had pulse meters back in those days, and there was definitely a kind of macho culture in which you had to be seen to be pulling hard all the time, even when we were doing so-called "half-pressure". We would be videoed from time to time and you could more or less gauge who was pulling the hardest by the relative size of the puddles that would well up around the "blade" (oar). Even if we had stuck to the program below, there were three sessions of series a week, two of them back-to-back, and at Oxford we weren't such "wusses" to take a day off, the only exception being if we had done a test or a race the day before.

I also found some stuff from the Oxford University Boat Club. According to the program, we were doing 5 two hour rowing sessions during the week plus two "double outings" of 3 hours on Saturday and Sunday, plus 3 weights / circuit training sessions in the mornings. That adds up to about 18 hours of training time a week, so it is fairly comparable to the sort of load I am under now - the difference is that I was only 18 years old back then and didn't have the kind of experience or one-to-one guidance to be able to assimilate that kind of load. On top of that was the pressure the hours of training + travelling + faffing about put on my academic work and my (then non-existent) student social life. I would do my "homework" in the van going back from the river in Wallingford, squashed up against the other rowers.

I was amused last night to read the following "recommendations for a healthy diet" - remember, we are talking about an 18 year old kid, away from home for the first time. My problem was that I just couldn't keep my weight up - in rowing, as your weight is supported by the water, there is much less penalty to being bulky than in running, say. Especially as the most objective tests we did were on a rowing ergometer where you weight is fully supported, bulkier was better. The recommendations for a healthy diet say that there are "no limits" on carbohydrates such as bread. Well, I used to sit in my college room and work my way through a loaf of bread with the aid of a toaster and a pot of marmite to make it more palatable. My rowing training coincided exactly with the time when lunch was available at college, so we managed to convince the staff to let us eat with them, at the slightly earlier time. Dinner was served in a hall and we had to wear - get this - a shirt, a suit jacket and a gown(!) - many times I would have to slip these items on over my all-in-one lycra rowing suit if I were to make it in time. We perfected a little trick whereby we would eat the main course or pudding so quickly that we could jump to another table and get served again: sometimes we would eat 3 main courses and 3 puddings. What an incredible metabolism I had at that age! Still, now knowing that "you are what you eat" and that, had I been eating properly, I might have been able to tolerate the training better, it makes me slightly sad. I hated the training - it was boring and hard and seemed pointless. Pointless because there were times when we would train more and more only to get more sluggish. I vividly remember one day our coach asking us whether we thought we were training too much - after a few nervous glances someone said (I even remember who was first to say it) "No, of course not". The fact was that I got ill very often, missing days of training and damaging the confidence the other members of the crew had in me. One time I got so ill and depressed that I must have scared the hell out of my dad on the phone because he turned up on my doorstep a few hours later after catching the first train from Cambridge. The final straw was when I managed to inflame a tendon in my wrist from the boat overbalancing and catching my oar in an awkward position. This was after 5 months of the 6 months of training before the Oxford Cambridge Boatrace (I had been selected for the Isis - Goldie race between the second boats). So you can imagine I was very pissed off and upset when I got "binned" - as they so tenderly called it - by Rupert Obholzer, but I was also incredibly relieved.

 

All this happened exactly 20 years ago and yet it is still like a little splinter under my skin that, however much I pick and hack away, I can't dig it out. It was my first real experience of failure and of being rejected by "the group". I think it is one of the reasons I have chosen such a solitary sport as triathlon and decided to train in such a lonely way. I don't want to depend on anyone else or on anyone else's opinion: this is my personal test and noone can say whether or not I get to take part or not. It has occurred to me that crossing the line at the Ironman in Brazil can, in my mind, be equated to competing in the Boatrace and will hopefully allow me to dig out that annoying little splinter at last.

That's me, just behind Olympic gold medalist Sir Matthew Pinsent (really!)

My fantasy bike collection

I'm sure that, if I were to see a psychiatrist, he'd suggest that my case of bike envy could be tempered by putting it all down on paper. If space, money and sense were of no importance then I would go out and buy


1. A triathlon bike

When you've got a budget in the 10s of thousands (euros, dollars, pounds - who cares), its probably quite difficult to choose between the top of the range triathlon bikes, unless you are a pro and get "lumped" with the one made by your sponsors. Choosing a bike is a bit like trying to choose a single malt: why choose between them when you should have one for each and every mood? The differences must be so tiny between the top bikes that it becomes a question of which one fits you best and which one has the best adverts in your favourite Triathlon magazine. For completely subjective reasons that I can't put my finger on, I would probably go for the Specialized Shiv Triathlon bike with Shimano Di2 electronic gears and a disc wheel thrown in (why not?). At least I already have the same water bottles as this chap, that's a start.

2. A full suspension Mountain Bike

I've never ridden on a "full susser" so I don't even know whether I would like it. After laughing at the other competitors for rocking up with full suspension bikes to a Duathlon Cross I did last year, I quickly realized why as I had to dismount for the steepest descents (and ascents, for that matter). On the trails that I go on to work, I think that a full susser would skip along even faster although I would lose the workout I get from the vibration on my single susser... There are so many different suspension systems and styles of Mountain Bike that I get lost. In a way, the sheer variety puts me off altogether because I know that I would only start coveting another slightly different Mountain Bike even if I satisfied my current desire. As I am pretty tall, I'm quite tempted by the so-called 29ers, which have 29" wheels. I suppose that the suspension is a bit more limited by the size of the wheel but I'd probably go for something like this (it would look nice sitting next to my current road bike):

You wouldn't be able to do anything crazy on it, like loony descents or stupendous stunts but, at my age, I think its best for me to avoid those kind of things anyway.

3. A fixie

Madrid isn't the best city in the world for a "fixie". For those of you who haven't been swept up by this strange cult, a fixie is a bike that not only doesn't have gears, but doesn't allow you to coast or freewheel either. The best thing about these bikes is their simplicity: you don't even need brakes (although at least one has to be fitted by law if you are going to ride on the roads) because, to stop, you simply stop pedalling. A slightly less extreme variant of the fixie bike are the single speed bikes which allow you to freewheel at least, but don't have any gears. Whether it is a fixie or a single speed is just a question of the back wheel - there are even "flip flop wheels" that have a freewheel cog on one side and a fixed cog on the other, so you can choose. In principle, many bikes can be converted into single speed or fixie bikes, but the trick is whether you can get the right tension in the chain: without the sprung derailleur thingy, you need to be able to set the back wheel at exactly the right distance from the chainstay and this requires a special kind of "drop out" (notch for attaching the wheel). The other way of going about it is by adding a chain tensioner but this seems totally pointless to me: the whole idea of a fixie is its elegant simplicity - put another cog in there and the friction increases and there are more parts that can wear out, just as with a regular bike. I wish I had had a fixie in Cambridge, where I grew up. I only ever used two gears of the 10 that I had on my racer: the lowest one to get started and the highest one to belt around town. In fact, when I started looking to buy a bike a year and a half ago, I rang round asking for fixies and the shop attendants told me that they had never sold one before. Now I have ridden around Madrid a fair bit, I can see why. Also, the gear mechanisms are so much better than they used to be: I was blown away by the concept of indexed gears (you used to have to fiddle about with the gear lever - which was mounted on the frame - to get the precise position - although, if you only ever used the highest and lowest gears like me, that wasn't a problem). Even though they are much improved, they are still not perfect and I would love to have one of those retro styled fixie bikes for zipping around town on. The annoying thing is, that they are now so fashionable that they are about ten times more expensive than they were "back in the day". I recently saw a beautiful model with leather seat and titanium(!) frame and all in Asturias of all places (its even more mountainous than Madrid!). This one from the Spanish bike manufacturers, BH, would do me just fine thank you very much...

Muscial interlude

Most of you probably are unaware that my "sporty" years have been a kind of parenthesis around a time when my hobby was deejaying. I built up a pretty impressive collection of vinyl records and deejayed in various clubs - some of them abroad - as well as doing a live radio show and a podcast in Madrid. My deejay friends seem to think that I have gone completely mad and that this blog is only further testament to that fact. Of course they are right, but they don't seem to see the connection which is, for me, "obsession" (or, to put it more fairly, "determination"). To dig out those rare gems, gathering dust in a back room of some struggling record store required a lot of commitment, not to mention knowledge and passion. Neil - my friend in whose honour and memory I am doing the Ironman - was a record digger par excellence. He was also a competitive cyclist in his time so its just possible that, had he still been alive, he might have been my only friend who could understand the draw of records and triathlon.

To some extent the two worlds operate on two different time zones but the real reason, as I lamented on my previous blog - Radio Madrid - is that I have been unable to summon up the passion to keep up my recording (as my wife calls it) since my energies have been diverted into sports. The one exception to that in the last 3 and a half years was a couple of months ago when I was inspired to go down to the basement and record a session that I could easily have recorded with Neil if things had been different. I thought I would post it here - if I can't convert my record friends to triathlon, perhaps I can convert my triathlon friends to records. Here's the tracklist and the link:

persuasive percussion - misirlou
moondog – bird’s lament
carla bley – sing sung lung
the chilites – inner city blues
sir richard – louie louie
george benson quartet – summertime
the third degree - mercy
enoch light and his light brigade – hijack
the jackson 5 – mirrors of my mind
babla and his orchestra – ramaia vatsavaiya
harry raboniwitz and the london festival orchestra- quiller
godiego – monkey magic
dee edwards – why can’t there be love
the deirdre wilson tabac – I can’t keep from crying sometimes
chaquito – special project
ramsey lewis – blue bongo
m + j - rejoyce

http://traffic.libsyn.com/radiomadrid2/radio18.mp3

Fight or flight?

I really have to work on my anger management. When my pulse is elevated, like it was yesterday in a medium intensity run (around 165bpm), my fuse is as short as a very short thing indeed. I was running along the edge of a road in the village where I live - the pavement is too narrow to run comfortably along, and the road has two lanes and a speed limit of 40km/h - when a car "beeped" at me. I stopped and he wound down his window to say that I couldn't run "in the middle of the road" and that he had nearly "killed me" because a bus had pulled out in front of him. I pointed out - no I shouted very rudely - that I had lights (both headlamp and flashing light strip on my ankle) and "what if I had been a bicycle?". This is always my argument: I was running along at a good clip, faster than most people cycle AND I had lights, so why should I not be entitled to use the same space that cyclists are allowed to use? Of course, motorists (and probably policemen, had there been any present) would find my argument rather baffling, as I was clearly sans biciclette.

You can see in my heart rate graph, exactly the point where I stopped, he stopped, we ruffled our feathers and then the "fight or flight" reflex kicked in and my heart rate jumped 10 beats due to the adrenaline injection. If you are reading this, I am sorry for calling you fat and lazy and for suggesting you should get out of your car and do some exercise instead. I'm really not very proud of myself for that. It's just as well we both chose "flight". One of these days I may not be so lucky.

PS: The other spikes in my pace are due to (a) having to pass through a security turnstyle and (b) having to scale a two metre high gate which gets locked at around 7pm.

I couldn't do it again even if I tried

First longish ride on the roadbike outside since September. I went over a speedbump a bit too fast and one of my drinks bottles went flying but I managed to catch it with my foot and avoid it falling to the road!

I'm still in shock...

...my wife just proposed, as a part of a general refurbishment of the house, that we buy a shed TO KEEP MY BIKES IN OUTSIDE!!!