Month 1 Report Card - March 2013

So, having been at this cycling lark for 1 month now, how does my report card look?

Attendance

21/28 days, with 4 days holiday, 2 days of inclement weather and 2 days for recovery seems to me to be a pretty good 'attendance' record. I certainly avoided any real truancy!

Distance

Having covered close to 84 miles this month is probably the biggest surprise of all theses statistics to me. I commented in an earlier blog that the sales guy in the cycle shop said "come back for your first service after a 100 miles". I thought, comparing this to my car, that this would be in 3-6 months, not 3-6 weeks! Admittedly, it's in this latter week that I've really started to ramp up the distance, with over 30 of these miles having been covered in the last 5 days. It will be interesting to see how this continues.

Duration

Time in the saddle has amounted to a few minutes short of 9 hours. This seems acceptable, in that I had always intended my rides to coincide with the 30 minutes or so that I would normally be arguing with myself as to whether still I had time for another chapter of my book before getting up for work. It was not my intention to be spending whole days out riding, far from it, my short attention span would not cope with that!

Fat Burn

The whole purpose of this cycling endeavour has been to get fit, and one measure of this has to be whether I've burned off any of that winter fat that I've been piling on, knowing full well that it was going to be a cold one! Looking at the calories, and I realise this is not an exact science as I've not been wired up to an ECG machine in some hi-tec medical facility, but according to my new electronic buddy, Endomondo, I've burned 6,094 kcals, apparently equivalent to 11 burgers! Disappointingly however, according to the bathroom scales, this has only translated into a 2lb weight loss. I am putting this miserable performance down to the build up of muscle in my legs, I hear it may be heavier than fat, so this must be the reason. As such, I am holding off reporting "must do better" until I've had another month under my belt - something, by the way, I'm also expecting to get looser!

Summary

So in summary, this first month has been a positive one, particularly as some 20+ years ago, the last time I bought a bike, I rode it to and from work on the first day, to work again on the next and then collected it from work in the car some 6 weeks later, never to ride it again! This month, I've increased my stamina from a wheeze around a 2 mile circuit into town and back, to a 3-4 village tour of 7+ miles with plenty of gas still left in the tank. I'm now looking forward the next few months, as the days get longer and the weather becomes warmer - I know, wishful thinking!