Back on the bike

So after about a month of not riding my bike to work I decided that it was time to get back to it. The reason I chose to stop riding was mainly due to the lack of light on the way home, plus it was getting pretty cold in the mornings. I have mentioned before that I'm now a wimp about the cold right? It now feels like anything below 10 C is downright frigid. But now that things are nicer, I'm going to be riding in as much as I can.

I did enjoy taking the bus, it gave me a chance to relax a bit and catch up on the TED videos that I have been collecting in iTunes. But of course the bus has it's disadvantages; it's not all that comfortable and I have to stick to a schedule that isn't my own. So other than the inability to watch videos while riding taking the bike to work has significant advantages. Counterintuitively, the ride actually boosts my energy during the day, rather than sapping it; it's just something about being active and keeping active.

Now of course, me being who I am, I tend to analyze things as much as possible, so my bicycling is no different. I've been using a heart rate monitor/speedometer for ages and the one I currently have allows me to upload the data to the web to analyze it further. I'd track the changes in my ride times and even look to see if there was a correlation between the time I left work and how fast I rode home... yes I'm a geek! So of course after almost a month off from riding I was obviously slower on the ride in. It's kind of interesting to see what that much downtime does to your cardiovascular capabilities. Below are figures from my web page, the first image is from in December (when I was fit). The red bar is how long I was working really hard, a heart rate over 180 beats per minute. Green is the zone I want to train in, from 160 to 180 and blue is when I was riding nice and easy. The total time for the ride was about 25 minutes.

The ride today was only a bit slower, around 26 minutes, but clearly I had to work a lot harder to get to work in that time. Obviously I still have the muscular strength, but clearly my cardio is shot. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to get me my lungs/blood back up to the level it used to be.