Getting back in the habit.

I’ve set myself the task of writing for half an hour a day. To get back into the habit, to feel I’ve produced something every day and to reintroduce routine in the days of Covid-19. I wrote some blogs last year I’m moderately proud of but fell badly out of the habit when I herniated a disc during a sudden street side lie down last year. Annoyingly this crash happened whilst riding very slowly to a criterium. The irony that it’s taken me a year to get back to fitness from a crash that occurred before the dangerous racing thing was perhaps too much and I lost motivation to write. I’m trying not to be too negative about it now and getting my fingers back in the habit of typing will be part of that.

It’s not as though the year was a total write off after that. I began the building of the core strength and back stability I should have started before I was forced to and, after a tedious layoff, did get back on my bike. Six weeks of nasty training on a turbo and I was, just about, fit enough to go on the Alpine holiday that had been planned at the beginning of the year. There I found serenity is a mountain pass and resolved to absolutely fill the next year with cycling holidays crammed to the gills with gradient, hairpins and glacier adjacent roads.

There are worse things to have lost, missing holidays are an enormously trite thing to be writing about in the current context so, none of that here. Also not appearing in these blogs, will be much commentary on the crisis. “I’m not an epidemiologist but” will not be appearing on this blog. I do however have a history with and degree in politics so possibly some of that down the line when we’re in the flow of things. Mainly I will be writing about cycling in lockdown. Some of my friends disagree with this, they say at this time we cannot possibly risk crashing and therefore cycling is too much of a leap. I disagree, I think the government stipulation that one ride/run a day is there because otherwise there will be mental health disintegration on national scale. My rides are scrupulously social distanced, I see people out riding with their buds and that is obviously lamentable behaviour, I do not think it’s the norm however.

On the positive side, speaking only as a cyclist, we’re experiencing directly the sudden massive drop in industrial activity. Less cars, less soot, more birds, undergrowth sightings and empty roads. The experience when riding in London is haunting. In our own environments the brain wants to see busyness, Oxford Street with no one there trips something in the uncanny valley of my brain. Outside the green belt, where my wheels generally take me, nature is getting its first chance in decades to breath out. Suddenly not too far from London you can own miles of empty lane. The hope has to be that when this crisis is over we realise that we can keep a lot of this. Not maybe the emptiness, but the quiet and the clean air. Lots of walkers don’t sound like the thunderous road of combustion engines.

Right! That’s enough for a first attempt, I’m also just going to be throwing these up onto the blog with minimal editing at first. Again refinement will come when I know I’m in the habit. Ditto longer projects, expect a fair amount of meandering. I’d love you to come along though and let me know what you think.

Peace!
Z