I am back on my wonderful, assisted exercise bike again and have slowly got back to “active” cycling for periods of 30 minutes – 1 hour each day and thanks to inspiration from “My Peak Challenge” (via binge watching “Outlander” series 1 – 3 on Amazon Prime), which I only found out about late in 2018 – October to be precise – via one of their lead actors Sam Heughan, who is very into fitness, runs marathons etc..
Now I could have been ‘put off’, as my days of climbing Ben Nevis (at 16 yrs of age) + walking the Nijmegen marches (in about 199?) have long since passed. I now use a wheelchair – due to Secondary Progressive MS. However, I still try to stay as active as possible and although walking any distance is a no-no, I do still try to cycle every day using my ‘assisted’ exercise bicycle and have in the past (about March 2018) managed to cycle every day for just over 3 to 4 weeks, for a sponsored cycle ride in aid of the MS Trust. Therefore, having just spent a couple of months going through a really bad patch, I wanted to try and get back to regular cycling on my ‘assisted’ exercise bike (and having very little willpower) I contacted @MyPeakChallenge via Twitter to see if it would be possible to carry out a “virtual” cycling challenge. They were very helpful and said that yes, of course I could do a virtual cycling challenge and in fact, they already had some people who had done just that. All I had to do was to decide what “my challenge” would be.
As usual, I immediately rushed into finding a route in the UK using Google maps to help me identify the appropriate cycle route, time and distance to complete it. My first thought was to cycle from Swindon (where I live) to Inverness and I set about calculating the route on Google maps. Bad mistake! Of course the cycling setting on Google maps assumes that you cycle at a “normal” speed and when I checked on the distances that I had covered during my previous, sponsored, ‘virtual’ cycling challenge back in March 2018, I quickly discovered that even at one hour cycling, the distance that I had managed to cover was ‘pathetic’ by comparison and therefore “my challenge” quickly changed to trying to cycle the distance between Swindon (where I now live) to Leicester (where I first moved, when leaving home from my parents at age 18). That seemed a much more achievable but stretching target and I decided to try and complete the distance by the end of 2018.
And now the important stats, from my previous efforts (March 2018), I knew that my ‘virtual’, active cycling rates were about:
30 minutes = 3 km, 45 minutes = 5 km & 1 hour = 10 km
Therefore, 171 km will take me about 35 hours of ‘virtual’ active cycling, which if I can manage between 30 minutes and one hour of active cycling each day should be possible by the end of 2018 (allowing for some missed days during the Christmas holidays).
