Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

560 milliFabians

Now I've finally started riding my bike enough that it might hopefully be making me a bit better at riding bikes, I thought I'd try something a little different to my normal circular routes this evening. Yes, it was time trial time, but only in a vague sense of the word. For starters, I only decided to actually care about my time about 8km in, which is the kind of thing I don't think ace time-triallists do.

The idea was fairly basic - ride out for 20 minutes, then turn round and ride back again, seeing how close my inbound time was to my outbound and how far I'd got at the turnaround point. This seems like a fairly good measure of overall fitness. Not wanting to waste any more time I started working a lot harder, and 20 minutes out from home I reached the turnround point after having covered just over 10km. The journey back took eight seconds longer - 20:08 - and had some stiffer uphill digs than the outbound, so in general not too bad.

Then I looked at the numbers. My average speed over the whole ride was 30.1kph, which isn't too bad when compared with, um, grannies on shopper bikes. Fabian Cancellara's ride in last Saturday's Tour prologue was at an average of 53.74kph (although to be fair, that was a much shorter and pan-flat course with not much wind), which means that my performance today can be measured as 560 milliFabians. Maybe one day I'll break 600.