Whilst I've been trying to build up my exercise over the last few weeks since I signed up for the challenge, I count my training as officially starting on Saturday 31st July when I got on a bike for the first time in my adult life. I'm staying with my parents on the Isle of Tiree this week and my dad and I have hired bikes for the time that I'm here so I'm getting a taste of island cycling. The advantages of this over Birmingham is that there's less traffic and a lot better scenery. The disadvantage is the wind! On the first ride out on Saturday, I actually made a comment on the way out that this was all much easier than I'd been expecting. Then we turned around and cycled against the wind and after that I didn't have much spare breath for comments of any kind.
Partly because of the wind and partly because of my poor general fitness, the distances travelled have not been great - 2.3 miles on Saturday and 2.7 miles on Sunday. We managed 4.5 miles today as the wind was a bit calmer though it began to pick up again towards the end. The aim is to get up to 8 miles by next Sunday (my last day here) with a break in the middle.
I learnt a valuable cycling lesson today. There were a couple of small hills to negotiate on today's ride. My dad suggested I switch to a lower gear to make getting up the hills a bit easier. This would have been good advice except that his gear box was set up differently to mine and he showed me how to make it lower on his bike - when I did the same thing on mine, I actually unknowingly changed to the highest gear. Not knowing any better, I assumed that the increased resistance was because I was going uphill. It was only at the top that we realised what had happened. Oh well, at least I know that if I can push my way up hills on the highest gears, it should be a doddle using the correct ones!
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