I Have To Do Something To Stay Fit, For Me It’s Cycling
I have to say I like to keep fit, but the truth is that I’m not very fit. I would like to be, but I’m not.
So I had to find something that I liked doing to keep fit. And bike riding is it.
I’ve said it before but I like cycling.
I came to cycling quite a while ago. Well no not that long ago actually, considering that I’m not all that young. I knew I had to do something to keep fit.
Swimmingnever did it for me. I mean swimming is boring, really boring. You just swim up and down, up and down, up and down. For hours. Actually it only feels like hours and hours, I rarly swim for more than about 20 minutes, that’s about as long as I can stand the boredom.
Theres that black line beneath you. You just go up and down that black line. Its mesmerising. Its meaningless, it’s really boring. I can’t believe how boring it is.
If you really want to get fit you need to swim at least 3 or 4 times a week, probably more. And if you find something boring then you’re not going to do it 4 or 5 times a week and keep at it like you need to?
And that’s doing at least a half hour of swimming. You need to swim for at least a half hour to get enough good exercise and it just feels like such a waste of time.
So I was in a bit of a bind. I used to jog and found that as boring as swimming and so I was a bit stuck. But then I started to think about doing cycling.
But I had a problem. I didn’t have a bike. Well I did have a bike but it was outside the shed in the junk pile and all rusted. Way too old. So somehow I had to get a good bike and it isn’t cheap to buy a good bike.
There’s a riding club near me so I went and talked to them and found out that they were starting a group of recreational riders and so I figured that the universe was telling me that it was time to buy a new bike, that it was the perfect opportunity for me.
So I joined the riding group and got cycling. I loved it. They did long rides and short rides and I did all of them. But after while I started to get a little frustrated with the speed of the riding.
I’m not very young but despite that I really felt that I could ride harder than the recreational group did, that it was as good social situation but I wanted to get fit and do a workout and it was way too slow for my liking. So I started riding on my own to get a quicker ride in and workout more.
So after a while of riding on my own I found that it was nice to ride hard but a little bit lonely. I was getting a workout on my own. So I made some enquiries and found out that there was another riding group that rode out of the town a few days a week that used road bikes and rode harder. It went on sundays and I decided to go along and give it a go.
But the bike I had bought was a hybrid bike, half mountain bike and half road bike and they all rode road bikes so I would have no chance of keeping up riding my hybrid. So again I was stuck without a good bike. But I knew I liked riding now so I bought a road bike and joined the group. They’re good riders and sometimes I can’t keep up but mostly I can keep up.
But of course its a very hard workout, exactly what I need. (more…)
