October 2008

So October turned out to be entirely on the bike, which I suppose makes a kind of sense given that the legs had been doing the heavy lifting through September. Three rides, just over four and a quarter hours in the saddle, and 117 kilometres covered — which by my standards represents something approaching a productive month. The Morning Ride (singular, though it sounds like it should be a daily habit rather than a notable event) was the one that stood out, and racking up 32 personal records suggests either that I was riding unusually well or, more likely, that I hadn't been on the bike in quite some time and the bar was sitting reassuringly low.

September, by comparison, was a single 39-minute run on a Tuesday morning — 6.9 kilometres at a pace that suggests I wasn't exactly chasing anything down. So the shift to cycling in October probably has less to do with a carefully considered training plan and more to do with the fact that autumn mornings in Britain have a way of making a bike feel marginally more appealing than running in the dark and the damp. Still, the numbers are moving in the right direction, and 429 metres of elevation over the month tells me I wasn't just riding flat circuits to avoid any actual effort. Whether November builds on this or quietly falls apart remains, as ever, to be seen.

Summary generated by Claude