I love cycling, I really do, I just love cycling a heap.
I came to bike riding quite a while ago. Well no not that long ago actually, considering that I’m not all that young. I knew I had to do something to keep fit and keep fatness away.
I tried swimming but it just never worked, I never took to it, in fact I didn’t like it at all. I just found it really boring and it was a real effort to get up in the morning and go swimming. You just go up and down and down and up and up and down and a minute feels like an hour. It’s dreadful.
There’s that black line underneath you. You just go up and down the black line. Its mesmerising. Its meaningless, its so boring. I can’t believe how boring it really is. I hate the black line.
So after trying swimming I knew that wouldn’t work. I knew I couldn’t spend 3 or 4 days a week putting some swimming into my day. Because if you’re going to keep fit you’ve got to do it about 3 or 4 days a week or more or you’re really just wasting your time.
And you’ve got to do about a half hour minumum. Less than that and its a bit of a waste of time, and like I said, it seems like a whole day.
So I was in a bind. I used to jog and found that as boring as swimming and so I was a little stuck. But then I started to think about cycling and it just stuck.
I didn’t have a bike although I used to ride to work many years ago. My old bike was up at the shed but its so rusted that its unusable. I knew I had to get another bike. And a new bike isn’t cheap, in fact it’s quite expensive.
So I went and talked to some of the people in the local cycling club and found out that there was a new recreational cycling group starting up and that I could join it. So I figured that I’d found my passion and it was time to just go out there and buy a new bike.
So I joined the group and got cycling. I loved riding. They did long rides and short rides and I did them all. But after while I started to get a little frustrated with the pace of the riding. It was slow.
I’m not exactly young but despite that I really felt that I could ride harder than the recreational group did, that it was a good social situation but I wanted to get fit and do a workout and it was too slow for my liking, way too slow. So I started riding on my own to get a faster ride in and workout more and get fitter.
So after a while riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride hard but a little lonely. I was getting a workout but on my own, but I could go faster. So I made some enquiries and found out that there was a riding group that rode out of town a few days a week that used road bikes and rode hard. It went sundays and I decided to go along, and it was a good decision.
But the bike that I had already bought was a half mountain bike and half road bike, called a hybrid, and so I had the wrong bike again, I needed a road bike. So again I had an issue with no bike that would do the job, but by then I knew I really liked riding so I bought a road bike and joined the Sunday group. They ride pretty fast and sometimes I keep up, occasionally I don’t keep up.
But it’s fun trying.
But of course its a hard workout, exactly what I need. (more…)