150 posts! (ish)

  • 150 post
  • World ASBO's and Christmas shopping
  • The Fisher Scientific challenge
  • Workplace Challenge

150 Posts.

Bit of a mini mile stone, but I noticed that my previous post was my 150th.  Bit of a miles stone of sorts, although the early post are a little in the wilderness, and the last one was just an update.   Plus this is the 151 post, whereas the 150th post should have been the 150th post.  Meah.

In a way, I'm kind of surprised I got this far, but I've enjoyed it.   Recent riding has been the winter base miles, commutes, Zwift'ing and trying not to fatigue too far to give me a solid base for 2017 so there isn't too much to blog about.   A bit like all the bits from reality TV which get left on the editing floor/HDD, life goes on with short spurts of epic'ness.  Winters damn cold - -6C on the way into work, around -4C on the way home - but with good layers, it's not that bad.   

I prefer to be looking at HR zones, average speeds and so on, but for those who want the blog stats:
  • 23,943 page views so far
  • My Ed-Lon ride analysis was my most viewed post (1245 views) followed by Ride of my life (788 posts)
  • The US (10146 views), UK (9296 views) and Germany (621 views) are my biggest audiences.
  • Reddit (r/bicycling, r/randonneuring and r/velo) and Facebook being the largest traffic sources.
Hardly ground braking stats or hitting Alexa as one of the top webpages, but hey, for a middle age office work, not bad!

World ASBO.

Currently I'm just shy of the 10k mile marker and should make it.  My stats are showing I'll have a couple of miles to spare so I may be on target for the 20th December (thereabouts).  The other stat is how much time I've been by myself - around 618 hours so far.  Or over 25 days solid of pretty much solo riding.   Some of this has never more than an hour or so on commutes, some of the early season riders it was soloing for 16 to 26 hours straight.  I think I've ridden possibly around 3% - 5% of the time with others due to the nature of my riding.   Does that that qualify for an ASBO??

By definition, I can't have a photo of me riding solo.   So here's Eddy doing his hardman training back in the day.
Spending that length of time solo has done a number of things;  
- the long solo rides sometimes were lonely, some of them I wish I'd shared experiences with, 
- other rides I'm glad I was solo, able to ride out bad moods, think about things and mull things over, dream, concentrate and experience.

The effect on every day life has been that I tend to be a quiet fella anyway and uncomfortable in large groups and social events.   My dyslexia has a quirk of making me a little slower to catch on to fast moving conversations as I usually want to dwell or think things through first.   I am not the extrovert sole of the party but I am the solid thinker with a dry sense of humour.  Last Saturday night I needed to go to IKEA on an errand.   Drive up, jump out of car, head into store.......the number of people around me hurrying, scrabbling for this, that or the other, buy superficial crap and weighing up the merit of one cushion or two...........

Years ago on Jura, Mrs Stav(-to-be) and I were doing a tandem tour of distilleries.  On a pub lawn that doubled as the camp site, Mrs Stav said "I think that's Mr Clifford, my old teacher."  And it was.  He and a friend were also stopping there and joked that they had a "World ASBO.  We're not allowed to go anywhere with a high population density!"   Ever since then, I've loved the idea of a World ASBO where I'm not allowed in highly populated places.   If I'm every found in IKEA agonising over which taps to get, I should be immediately extradited to Scotland with my bike and told I have to ride over the Applecross Pass.

The Fisher Scientific challenge

The Fisher cycling challenge is going to go through, but in a different fashion.  The original idea was for the group of us to split the distance between us as a small team.  As I've blogged before, this year has been a long year, and I'm ready to quit the bike for a break so I can't commit to riding >300 miles on a static in the way we had planned.   I know the feeling and experiences of both 24 hr+ rides and riding 3 hr+ on a static.   With my lingering illnesses, there's no way I'd be able to push through to >300 miles.  BUT........

Fisher have rolled with the idea across the whole site.   We've opened up the challenge to all employees across Fisher Scientific to join 3 of our team who'll do 8 hrs per day on the 15th and 16th December in Loughborough PureGym.  All sponsership money is going to SOS Children’s Charity - Greece.

Workplace Challenge.

Last week I had the opportunity to be part of the feedback on the Workplace Challenge.  For those who don't know, it's this and a great way to keep in shape, motivate and rival those around you.    Different activities get different points to even things out - my cycling can rival a runner, or boxer, or swimmer, of gym bunny, or climber, or...............

As of today, I'm 17th nationally but the forum was a good way to feedback to how and what has happened.   The initial launch in January was brilliant and motivated a lot to get going, but like any challenge (or gym membership) consistency of use is key.   My motivation at the start was to see how I did, by mid year ti was habit and by the end of year, I want to get higher ranks!   For those of a more sound mind, that level of commitment is tougher as the rewards, remembering to log and so on appears to have a lower payback.  I'll probably be back on it next year (but please, Garmin integration!!).

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