Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Winter Training

An envelope arrived today with my race number for the Cabbage Patch 10, which is the weekend after next, and it should be, well, interesting as I haven't actually run very much if at all recently. I just hope the cardiovascular fitness the cycling I've been doing has helped to maintain will get me round, but I'm not exactly likely to post a hugely impressive time. We'll see. I'm going to pretend I never entered the Dublin Marathon, though - that's at the end of this month and there's no way I'll be in any kind of running form for it.

Other than that, it's cycling at the moment. Commuting into work by bike most days is proving fun, although it's fairly frustrating when you're wearing Lycra (makes sense as I have to change when I get in anyway) and riding a road bike to keep getting caught at traffic lights and in traffic. The more devil-may-care cyclists around me will happily jump the lights and zip through gaps between two buses that leave only a few inches on each side, but I personally have a strange desire to keep living, and tend to be very defensive. I'm possibly a little too careful sometimes, but given that paranoia is a virtue when cycling around central London that's fine by me.

Longer distance rides are a problem as living in inner London means that to get anywhere involves riding out of London first, taking the train or fitting the bike rack to the car, but I've recently discovered that Shooters Hill Road (which a long time ago was the A2, the Dover Road) seems quite promising - there are a couple of sharp climbs (as the name suggests) but once there the road seems to point quite nicely towards Canterbury and Dover. I might try just keeping going along there for a day sometime and see how far I get. Most of the traffic takes the M2 these days, so it should be reasonably tolerable from the traffic point of view.

Of course, we shall see how this resolve sticks as the nights draw in, the days get colder and I find that staying indoors in the warm is a much more pleasant prospect. I might just have to do more running, which is something I'm happy doing in all temperatures.