Cyclists Have Eyes Too, You Bastards.

*Deep breath*

Approaching first big hill, and wonderfully silent and smooth new chain starts to jump and slip. Have to get off and push bike up hardest hills in pissing rain and dark.

Get to work, people insist on being annoying and having petty arguments and making each other actually cry, I mean, what the actual fuck?! Go to order new cassette, discover I have no idea how many teeth old one has, have to think of excuse to detour with work car back to where I left my bike so I can count. Then hurrah! There is an incident, didn't even need to lie.

I rinse and dry my bike clothes, and when I went to get them out the dryer I find a man in his nineties has removed them so he can put his stuff in, and is inspecting my bra.
'Didn't think it belonged to any of the wifies in here.' he says as he hands it over. I feel sullied. It's only a sport's bra, but still. If this is what communal laundries in sheltered housing are like when I'm old, blood will be spilt.

The wind picks up. I set off home with rain blasting in my face, lit in such a way by my head-torch that it looked like driving into snow. So, so wet through, water running off head and down back of neck.  Drenched. Backpack heavy. Bum and saddle soaked, a sore, chaffing nightmare.
Utter blackness. Have to aim my head at the road the whole time to have any idea where I'm going. Neck hurts.

About 50% of cars dip their lights as soon as they see me. About 25% dip them as soon as they see me raise my arm to shield my eyes. The other 25% don't bother at all, making me flail my arm, brake, and swear. And ultimately, a couple of times, fear for my life. This is all I saw, most of the way home.

Then I remembered the time I was sailing with my dad in the winter in rough weather, and his shoes got soaked, and he took them off and big wave came over and took them and the spare shoes away, and he spent the rest of the time barefoot. And we were out there for days. Blue, frozen feet. Made him even less patient with my crappy sailing skills and impressive vomiting skills, but he didn't actually complain once (about the cold feet, never shut up about my puking). So I told myself to-

 MAN UP, LUCY. 

Worse things happen at sea. And in trenches in wars. You can cycle in cold and dark and wet and wind. Think about hot showers and oven chips.

Pulling A Buoy

Today I ordered a pull buoy. I am very much looking forward to it's arrival as I love them, and they have a slightly rude name, but it's not the wisest move as I know it's my legs that are the problem, and I should be more worried about them.

My drills were horrific. It's my legs, man. They're just rubbish.
I thought I was swimming more evenly, but nope, I suck. When I did side kicks, the right was slow but the left was actually stationary. I slowed after the initial push off, and then judging by the markings along the side of the pool, stopped. I kicked really hard and still nothing happened, so before flirty lifeguard thought I was drowning and jumped in, I switched back to the right. I think I must have been bending my knees too much or something. For the next few weeks I am going to be all about the kickboard and pull buoy. It won't be fun, but dammit, I will do this right.
People keep saying with triathlons it's wise to save the legs, but I at least need to be able to use them in the first place, if I then choose not to kick so much, fair enough, but I shouldn't be not using my legs because they are shite.

I can heartily endorse the ZMA. I wake up in the morning feeling like a collie on speed. Yesterday I was awake at 5.30, and it was my day off. It doesn't make me fall asleep earlier, but when I am asleep I stay there, and it's good quality snoozin' time.

Week 5

Sooooooo cold yesterday morning.
It hurt to breathe. Thick ice on the small, untreated roads. At one point when I was climbing, my back wheel kept spinning out, my brakes levers froze and my bike was still doing it's wacky gear change thing at the time, but in spite of all that I did feel I was enjoying it. My legs were achey from running the day before, and thought I'd find it hard going, but it was a beautiful morning and even the ride home with all the uphills was ok.

I really need to get my 10k speed up. I'm going to use a flat route and monitor my pace and keep it nice and steady, and see how that alters things. It seems I effectively need to learn to run, as well as swim and cycle.

The plan for week 5 -

Monday - Gentle swim, thinking about form, doing some drills, averting eyes from the elderly Monday man and his trunks that don't house him adequately. + 30 min run

Tuesday - 30 mile bike

Wednesday - Rest (BOOO!)

Thursday - 30 mile bike

Friday - 1 hour run

Saturday - 20 mile road bike 'fun' circuit.

Sunday - 1 hour run

So that's one proper rest day, and one easy day.

I'm also drinking my protein, taking my ZMA, and trying to be in bed for 10.30. Even if I don't sleep and just lay there reading, I'm in the right place.

Motivation. Petty, Petty Motivation.

My friends are lovely people.
The hands down funniest moment of my life is when the other Lucy was sat in her totally frozen car (during a mega cold snap, about -15), and I thought I'd be clever by getting some cold water to throw at her windows to help, and began to squirt a 2 litre bottle of water from my boot with chunks if ice in it, at her window just as she rolled the heavily frosted glass down, thereby soaking her with freezing water. I was laughing too much to explain, but luckily she was laughing too and didn't kill me, and I literally did nearly pee myself.

I have also been blessed with yet more things in the post. Cat re-homed some protein powder my way, and it's handy as it has no flavour, so can be added to anything I can chuck in my blender. Pam sent me a whole tub of ZMA and the bestest soya beans ever (they are open in the photo as I had started eating them). My mountain bike has been misbehaving and will be a patient in Kevin's Hospital For Poorly Bikes this evening, so all in all, I'm a very lucky gal.

The other supplements in the picture are things I'm taking reasonably regularly, a few times a week or so.

And I noticed on Facebook someone I don't like will also be doing the Lumphanan 10k at new year. He is faster than me, and probably has a 50 min 10k. I won't be able to beat him with just 8 weeks to go, but I will be faster than I am now, and not disgrace myself. At Baker Hughes last year there was a girl who annoys me (just for her terrible driving, she tears about like a nutter and nearly ran me into a ditch once) and I was determined to beat her, and I did, but she was nearly and hour and half for a 10k, so beating that is no great achievement. So yes, I'm petty, but I'll be damned if he has time to finish and get his stuff together and have gone home by the time I reach the line.

Sitting And Planking

Yesterday was horrible in a work sense, and to cheer myself up I bought Green Lantern on DVD in Tescos. I'd heard it was terrible, so avoided it up until now, but then, it's got Ryan Reynolds in it, so realistically, how bad could it be for a fiver?

Superhero films always make me want to be a bit more muscular and Wonder Woman like.
I have some weights I use regularly, but I've decided to up things by doing a ludicrous amount of planking and wall sits. The first time I did a wall sit I managed about 30 seconds, built it up to a couple of minutes and until last week hadn't done one for 18 months. It must be all the biking and I did 1.30 easily, and only stopped because the phone was ringing (I was at work, I have a duty to answer it there, if I'd have been at home I would have ignored it, as usual.)
My plan is to wall sit for for 1 min and plank for 30 seconds, every hour I'm at work.
That's 4 mins of planking and 8 of wall sits.
Then I'll up it, and plan a total of half an hour of this each work day. I can work whilst doing these things. I spend a lot of time on hold to IT waiting to report my broken down printer.
I have a pull-up bar at home that I occasionally hang from. I hereby pledge to be able to do at least one pull up by Christmas.

I'm doing lots of overtime next week as I'm supposed to be off but I'm going to work though it. It's going to dictate my training plan and so shall be very bike based. I've been asking other bike commute people what they do to make it a lot less hassle.
I have started buying knitted dresses to wear with leggings as they don't get wrinkly, and I keep some boots and a coat in the boot of my work car. It's the getting cleaned up that takes the most time, and I also like to wash and dry my bike clothes  ready for the retun jounney (sheltered housing schemes have laundries I can invade) as I seem to get wet everyday. Even if it doesn't rain, there's often surface water and mud to be sprayed at me. One person I know said he takes one of those little microfibre towels that we got used to seeing divers use for when he showers at work, to save space.
The lovely Anneke is also a fan of non-iron dresses and keeping shoes at work, but her main piece of advice to cycle commuters is "stop caring what you look like".

Fair enough.

Learing To Ride A Bike

So it seems I need to learn to ride a bike (again).

The fabulous book I'm reading has opened my eyes to all the things I should be doing, such as how I position my body on the bike.

The actual physics of riding is not something I had ever considered, when the stand up to allow the rear wheel to clear an obstacle with minimum weight, and when to sit down to add traction. Right now I stand up over bumps for the sake of my butt, nothing else.
It had never occurred to me that there would be a technique to emergency stops, that I should be lowering and forcing my body back, and that a sudden right hand swerve required a slight flick to the left first.
It's not going to come naturally, but there's a nice section that details all these things for me to have a practise at.

Yesterday was a reasonably bad day at work that started too early and finished too late, because other people are a bit rubbish. I did some press ups, planking and wall sits in my office, and some yoga when I got home. Today will be worse as there are more people to disagree with, and my bike is poorly so can't cycle, but have just been for an early, headtorch-lit run, again, obeying the numbers on my Garmin. And dutifully logging all my food and activity. And yesterday I paid some bills and bought my nephew a birthday present. And cooked a proper dinner.

It won't last. As this is why I'll never be an adult. 

Keeping Records Like A Grown Up

I'm gonna get organised in a new-fangled fashion.
To take this seriously and properly monitor things, I have to keep accurate records. I've always shied away from doing that, as I don't really want to know how crap I am.

However, not any more.

I have been given a very comprehensive spreadsheet to log my activity, that has more columns and sections  than I ever would have thought of including, and I've started using Food Focus as it works out all my calories, deducts my exercise, and draws a nice little pie chart of how much protein and carbs I have had. This is not to just for weight loss purposes, but also making sure I eat a sensible amount of calories on days I'm not very hungry, and to keep an eye on my protein. And finally I made a little table for vitamins and supplements, as often I forget to take these things regularly.  They don't need to be taken daily, but I have a nasty habit of forgetting to take iron, and then getting anaemic.

So bingo, bango, hopping to it, gonna do this thang!

And swimming was good, although I was flanked on either side by fast blokes who bring water bottles, have fancy swim watches and swim literally twice as fast as me.
Come back slow old ladies who get in my way, all is forgiven.