May 2014

Before starting out on that first ride in May 2014, I'd downloaded the Map My Ride app to my phone, but after a week or so I switched over to Strava. Both are pretty similar, but I just preferred the strava one so stuck with it. Although there is lots of information that you can look at for each ride, especially if you access it on a laptop, I've always mostly used it to keep track of how far I've cycled each month, and how much ascent.

If you ride the same routes regularly, its also encouraging to see your times slowly improve as the weeks go by, although I'm too slow to really get into the whole "segment chasing" angle, except when there's a stiff following wind!

Here's the strava track from that first inauspicious ride...

Between the 19th and 31st of May I managed to get out every day and had racked up 188 km and 2,250m of ascent. Not too bad for a fat lad! By mid-June I got seriously obsessed - I discovered lycra gear in Lidl, and managed another 280km, all on that old, heavy, slow, uncomfortable and ill-maintained hybrid!

My longest ride so far had crept up to 40km but it was proving difficult to go much further on the hybrid as it was just so uncomfortable! Something drastic was going to have to be done to improve the ride quality and soon!