Getting into it

I'm into week #3 now. My week-day diet has been good, my blood sugars have been great, my exercise has been improving, and my excesses getting less but more concentrated.

After last weeks hill climb, I hooked up a decent bike to the indoor spinner and it's much more comfortable in the saddle when I can stretch my legs properly and not hit my knees on the handlebars! However, I was still only doing 40mins at a time and knew I had to get my time in the saddle up. If I'm going to be doing hundreds of km over sequential days, I need to be able to spend large amounts of time peddling. More saddle time required, so I'll be adding some this week - let's try for 60 minute sessions now and continue to build each week.

The weekend saw in influx of relatives, and a major influx of red wine. So, Saturday night was a late one, and while I was OK on Sunday it did make for 2 days of no exercise, and poor decisions.

Monday was a holiday, and despite the southerly blowing and grey skies I decided there were not enough excuses not to get my bike out and ride to Mums place along the river. It's about 35km with only about 6km of motorway exposure and mostly flat, or downhill. With bag packed I headed off, and by the time I was half way the skies were blue, the breeze was at my back, and I was feeling good.

This ride was a test case - I wanted to monitor my blood as I went, timing for when my sugars bombed, so I made several short stops to test, and managed to detect when they were dropping, and get them back up again. Unlike the last time I did this ride, I felt really good during it. In fact, I was at mums place in under 2 hours, so I was very happy indeed. Because it was sunny in the valley, I also got a bit sunburnt, not something that has happened on my bike for quite some time!

This weekend we're heading to Christchurch for Buskers Festival so I have no weekend plans for fitness. Maybe I should put in some extra hours on the bike this week instead? The weekend after might be a good time to have a crack at a long ride, something with more of a challenge in it. No sense if living in a false sense of ability and it's only 5ish weeks till the radle!