Mud in my eyes

Last year I got a GPS for xmas. So one year later, I’ve ridden 356 miles. Except I know I’ve ridden more because I didn’t always remember to take the gps with me on rides where I knew where I was going. Well duh, why would you. Except of course, now I know. Data.

Flicking through my activities list there are some big numbers ridden. 20 and 30 mile rides up and down dale. But they’re just numbers, a list of data that doesn’t mean anything to me until I remember the actual rides themselves.

I’m a bit of a secret data addict – I love spreadsheets, love finding the stories in data, love tracking trends and producing shiny graphs and infographics to make it easier for people to understand the enormity of numbers. But when it comes to my own – well what does 350 miles mean?

I suppose for someone who was over 19 stone, quite a lot. I pushed that 19 stone up a lot of hills with muscles far stronger and connected than they had any right to be.  Eventually I stopped sweating and panting and started to serenely climb hills, looking forward to the quiet peace which comes from there being nothing else in the world but getting to the top. I found quiet in my mind and quiet lanes out in the countryside. I found bike handling skills which meant I rode my cross bike on roads the same way I would a mountain bike, cornering and leaning and body position just so, no skidding, no skittering, just glee at preserving momentum. I mastered flicking bar end gears instead of thumb shifting and I finally learnt about using gears properly both up and down in order to not end up expending too much energy on the climbs.

I met some amazing people and got to know some others better. I learn that in the same way football can be the glue of social chatter, so too can a love of the Tour De France. I watched men destroy themselves to win and understood, just a little, every such a little, the pain but also the weird pleasure in stripping everything in your body back, that place where your mind has gone walkabout but your body carries on functioning anyway because it knows it has to and getting to the end is all that matters.

I rode 5 of the 7 Stanes in a day. I spent some time with someone awesome whose quietness rubbed off on me a little. I got a few nasty lesson in fuelling and took them with me too. I lost all embarrassment at my body in a car park somewhere in Scotland and understood that power comes in many packages and mines just a little bit different.

I lost a stone. Already it’s making pedalling a different experience. It’s more pleasurable but it’s tempered none of the determination to push as hard as possible up hills. My breath is ragged now because I’ve set out with the express intention of making it so, not because I’m out of control and unfit enough that simply pedalling makes me out of breath.

I over took people slower than me. Hundreds I think. And in the middle of a sportive entered by just under a 1,000 people I found a whole entire road to myself and felt something else, a feeling I’d not felt since I came second in a cross country race a really really long time ago. I felt achievement. It hurt, and there were tears, but people sponsored and were kind and the money went somewhere incredibly important and it was worth every second for the click which happened on that road alone.

So that was the last year. What of the next?

I’ve got some targets. I want to go back and complete 7 of the 7 Stanes. But the main target I suspect will help with that – to be a size 14 by next Xmas. Realistically, really realistically, it will be an easy target to hit and I should, by that point, have been a size 14 for some time. But size isn’t everything of course, fitness is. So along with that, I need to ride a lot of miles, and a lot of road miles at that, to build a set of muscles which will take me up the hills I want to climb.

I want to go on a mini adventure. Lots of mini adventures. I want to enter the Singletrack silliness at Lee Quarry this year – but there are a tonne of other things I want to do too.

But ultimately, really, all I want to do is ride my bike. Everything else is a bonus. I just want to ride my bike. Lots. I want to break my Brooks saddle in and I want to ride the drops on my handlebars comfortably. I want to learn how to really take my cross check off road and make it earn its keep. I want to commute to work in sunshine and I want to sit on the top of a mountain and know I can ride all the way back down.

But most of all, very most of all, I want to be able to ride in a group of people, a big group of people, and just keep up. Be in the middle somewhere. Drift around and chat a bit. Relax enough about my fitness that sparing conversation wont impact on my ability to complete the ride. Because if you’ve ridden with me and found me quiet – that’s why. I am not a fun person to ride with at the moment. I conserve breath because I need to.

By this time next year, I want to be able to ride with the girls and keep up. That’s all.

That’ll do.