The Cycling Challenge

For the last thirty days I've been doing a cycling challenge. I'd like to say it was intended to raise money for a much needed charitable cause or that record books will now have to be re written to reflect my achievements.

But no, the only goal was to ride every day for thirty consecutive days and the only achievement has been a minor (but much needed) weight loss.

The rules for this challenge were simple. Every day I had to ride my bike, on road, rollers or turbo trainer for a minimum of 20 minutes. However a ride of 20 minutes would have to be a flat out sprint time trial and not a bimble. Bimbling 'recovery rides' of 30 minutes were allowed to give my poor aching legs a break. To keep it fun I split the sessions up and planned a week ahead to ensure I didn't get a weak head and bottle it on any given day.
Week one: various 'real life' dvds of routes on the turbo trainer
Week two: Sufferfest dvds on the turbo trainer - painful sessions of 50-60mins but at maximum effort
Week three: Sessions on the rollers, that ended up being Sufferfest on the rollers, like watching an elephant trying to sprint across a floor covered in ball bearings
Week four: longer distance turbo sessions 60-120km

It's been difficult to force myself to ride everyday, there've been days when my legs were still dead from the previous day's efforts, when I was hungover or when I had a dodgy stomach... So it's been as much a mental challenge as a physical one. Today was the last day,  I'll now take a day off all training then start back on a proper 24 week program that should get me fit for Ironman Germany in July.

The Challenge in Numbers:

Distance cycled: 1122 km
Calories burned: 23,000 (approx)
Weight lost: 5.5kg
Litres of water consumed:  60 (approx)
Number of times fallen off rollers: 2
Shirts worn: 36

Think I'll have a wee rest now, I'm knackered.

Nuts Part 1

I blame the parents. It has to be someone's fault. A total dislike of team sports (except women's beach volleyball) and a lack of depth perception combined with such poor co ordination  that I struggle to find the Pause button when Maria Sharapova is mid-serve. 

I seem to be attracted to the 'sports' that involve improving your own performance rather than beating others. OK thai boxing might have involved trying to kick seven shades of sh*t out of an opponent, but for me it was always about learning more technical moves, stretching further, kicking higher and faster. I was a pretty useless fighter, but could do the moves perfectly. Probably why I could teach others to fight better than I could do it myself. Rollerblading was always about finding new, higher, steeper sets of stairs to ride down. Falling and falling until they were mastered, then moving on to find a new challenge. With scuba diving I went through the qualifications up to instructor, then was getting into technical diving and rebreathers when I left Thailand. This was about diving deeper, staying down longer and mixing gases in order to combat the body's natural preference to being  on the surface with a nice frosted margarita rather than slowly poisoning it with Nitrogen at 50m down. I dabbled with strength training while in Thailand, increasing the weights every session, finding it hard to sleep at night as my legs were hurting so much. The downside of this kind of training was people would always ask you to carry heavy things ,as you were the 'strong one'. I was training to be a donkey.

I quickly went from running in a 10km race to wanting to do a marathon. I only started to do triathlon because I thought it would force me to learn to swim front crawl, but I knew when I signed up for my first sprint triathlon (750m swim, 20km bike , 5km run) that I'd end up doing an iron distance race (3.8km swim, 180km bike, 41km run) - I can't help myself. Now of course, I want to do another, but want to go faster than before. I want to take an hour off my Barcelona time and go under 12 hours in Germany next year.

Norseman Swim Start

But going faster isn't enough, I want to know how far my body and mind can go. In 2012 I want to do a double Iron distance race, which should be about 30hrs of fun. There's always a triple or quint, but then you're getting into sleep deprivation and losing toe nails. Alot of these ultra distance races involve huge numbers of laps of short bike & run circuits, which keeps things safer (should you collapse or fall asleep while moving!) but are boring. I think I'll attempt the double then just look for the harder or more interesting challenges. Ironman Lanzarote is a brutally hard iron distance course, whilst the Norseman race in Norway starts the swim with jumping off a ferry into a fjord, and after a tough bike leg, ends with a run up a mountain. 

Also interesting is the more bizarre stuff like Ö TILL Ö in Sweden, described as:

A simple concept – teams of two run and swim, continuously, during the hours of daylight, from the northern end of the Stockholm archipelago to the south, encompassing 22 islands from Sandhamm to Üto. 

Total distance is over 66km; 57km running and 9.3km swimming

So that's running in your wetsuit and carrying your running shoes and backpack while you swim - mad as a box of frogs!

Finally there are the people who were dropped on their heads as babies. Starting on November 14th and running (or more likely sadly shuffling) until 12 December, we have The Deca and Double Deca Iron Distance race in Mexico. I'll need a calculator for this:   76km swim, 3600km of cycling and 844km of running. The swim is 1520 lengths of a 50m pool, the bike ride is over 1800 laps. Even if you got to see Megan Fox pole dancing once every lap - it'd get tedious.

Go Arthur!

The winner, as long as they finish in 28 days, gets $2000, which won't even cover the costs for you and your support crew. There'll be no sponsorship deals and I'm pretty sure the WAGS won't include glamour models helping to drain blisters, cut the toes out of running shoes or live in a tent by the side of the track for the best part of a month, feeding their athlete a steady stream of food, drinks and verbal and emotional support. I'm going to be following the daily results for a month. I'm backing Arthur Puckrin, well he's British and his birthday is only 2 days after mine. And he's 73. 
Go Arthur, you're brilliant & barking mad. I blame your parents.

 FOLLOW THE FUN HERE

Tyred Out

Looking at websites and Blogs influenced by Crossfit training or 'Old School' Iron Gyms got me motivated to try and spice up my own training. Monotony is no good for the mind or the body and keeping them guessing helps in their development. So what to use and how to use it? Luckily, Libya is like a scrap heap with roads, or roads with scrap and garbage everywhere. Within 2 minutes walk of my house I can find enough building materials to put Homebase out of business and pretty much all of the components to build  a complete car, or at least what passes for vehicular transport here.
I thought dragging a car tyre would be a good start, to make my morning 5km walks more of a challenge. At the moment running is still on hold until the achilles tendonitis clears up, so I like to spend an hour each morning tramping around the various dirt tracks near the house. Sometimes I carry a rucksack with a load of dumbells in, but dragging a tyre across sand ? That had an appeal to the masochist within.
I'd seen some tyres near my house, so brought one back and left it behind the outer wall of the garden. I then picked up some rope for about 5 quid.The shopkeeper took plenty of time to measure out how metres I wanted with a bent old stick, he then charged me by the the kilogram - after 2 years in Libya, I didn't question the logic.
Back to house and I went to reclaim my tyre. Nothing there. Well apart from all the plastic bottles and usual garbage that accumulates overnight. I couldn't believe someone would steal a used tyre, unless there was another like minded masochist living nearby whom I'd yet to meet on my runs. A quick scout of the area soon revealed the missing tyre on a neighbour's garbage pile. After carrying it back home, I found out that Abdul (my 'guard'ener) had seen the tyre, thought some cheeky bugger had dumped it by our house, so had moved it. At least I think that's what he said. my O-level french from 1985 is somewhat rusty and he visibly winces as I murder the language. But not as much as he would if I tried to talk to him in Arabic.
The next day, like a kid with a new toy, I set out on a 5km walk, dragging the tyre behind me. Overnight rain meant the sand was pretty hard and made it easier, although noisier. Not that I worry about waking up the locals, I get up at 0545, the 1st call to prayers is about 0550 at the moment, so if I wake up the neighbours then:

1.) I'm doing them a favour.
2.) One of us is going to hell and it isn't the tyre dragging atheist.

Plus, I've got an I-Pod on, so the noise doesn't bother me.

The walk itself was OK and to be honest not that hard, running with the tyre, now that's going to be fun.
However, turning down a side track to my house, in the dark at about 0700hrs, a pick up truck pulled up alongside me. Usually I ignore cars or maybe give them a wave as they pass. This one didn't pass, but pulled up alongside.  Looking up I saw it was a police truck with 4 coppers in. This wasn't the green/white truck of the 'Supermarket police', who have as much influence as a 'Stop' sign, it wasn't the blue/white truck of the 'Traffic Police',  the uniformed wonders whose task it is to cause traffic jams at junctions where natural law and 'who dares wins' actually works better. Nor was it the 'secret' police who drive around in flash dark cars, with blacked out windows and the biggest radio aerials you've ever seen. This was just the local fuzz who drive around looking for people to stop in order to increase their own basic salaries.
Obviously just coming on shift, I had piqued their curiosity, although they were probably trying to decide if they could fine me for a motoring offence. Anyway, one of them leaned out, said hello in broken English  and basically gestured to me with the universally understood  hand gesture for "what gives?"
There was nothing to be gained by any sort of in depth explanation or a joke about it being cheaper than keeping a dog, so I just made a 'Charles Atlas' style pose and said something along the lines of  "Makes  me strong". They all burst out laughing, said 'very good', reversed and drove off.
I'd like to think they were laughing in a 'look at the crazy white guy' sort of way and not in a 'you better keep dragging that tyre a lot further then Chunky' way. Either way, I thought it'd have been interesting if the same law keepers had pulled me over 2 hours later as I drove to the office. I think I could've talked my way out of that one.

Then again, how would a car full of police in the UK  react to finding a 'Muslim' who spoke no English, dragging a car tyre through the streets of any town at daft o'clock? I got off lightly really!

Once they'd left me to finish my morning drag, I realised the stupidity of it all to everyone else. Any of my friends I told the story to would laugh for a second then, to a man, they'd pause and say "WTF were you dragging a tyre through the streets at 6am?"
Fair point.


Next: Carrying a breeze block for 5km at 6am.