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..
“Assisted” exercise bike & TV
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.
“Virtual” cycle route from Swindon to Leicester via National Cycle Route 41
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).
