Due to the unexpected arrival of a rescue lurcher I've been a bit slack with the cycling for the past 2 months. Paolo's been cycling the 4 miles to and from work but today we started our training schedule which has been meticulously worked out to allow for inactivity during the festive seasons. We're easing ourselves into it to avoid injury and it was a beautiful day today to saddle up.
The good things about cycling around London are the new cycle super-highways that are becoming more widespread -these are like king size cycle lanes which are much less pot holed than your average road - and the ability to see so many different sights in a 2 hour outing. Unfortunately there are down sides too - our fellow road users are not particularly considerate with their road positioning so the cycle lanes are not always free to use. We had a group of scooters blocking the lane in Putney and numerous cabs with their wheels to the kerb. We had to dodge various piles of broken glass from the Saturday night revelry.
The biggest drawback of city cycling is that we worked out we spent 25 mintues of the 2 hour cycle waiting at traffic lights. Now at times my legs were quite glad of the rest but I can't help but feel the training would be more effective if we kept moving.
I've started to use a website called runkeeper.com with its phone app. It allows you to plan and record your routes and I've been able to choose some routes that another cyclist had already uploaded. I'm going to try to keep it up to date with our training. If any of my fellow team mates are already using it or decide to start then send me a message so we can become team mates on the website and keep track of eachothers training.
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