Blog entries tagged with "fitness"

Today was my last day of work for the year, but more importantly yesterday was the last time I would commute to work via bicycle in 2015. I am happy that I have mostly kept to my target of riding to work twice a week, some weeks I manage three times, but others only once or for a couple I didn’t ride at all.

I have been tracking all of my rides via an app on my phone, so if I wanted I could go back and see exactly which weeks I did not meet that target. What I did look up was the total distance I have ridden: 3,938km across 187 rides. While almost all of this is the commute, there have been a handful of other rides, there are six days left in 2015, a ride or two should get me up to 4,000km.

Next year I will up my target, I will aim to ride three times a week…

There is no nice summary for it, but something else I noticed while looking back through the rides in the app is that my average speed has changed. The ride in the morning (downhill following the creek/river) has changed from an average of 25km/h up to an average of 27km/h, with the ride home (uphill along the creek then a climb at the end) changing from 20km/h to 22km/h. It is not much of a change, but nice to see.

I have also been tracking my walks through the same app, it shows 89 walks for a total distance of 488km. I also expect that to get up to 500km by the end of the year.

It is almost half a year since I decided that things had to change. I’ll just put this here:

Very few people know this, but for a number of years I have had a gym membership, the last few of those also including a weekly PT session. Recently I came to the realization that I was wasting my money, for the simple reason that I have not been motivated enough to make proper use of it. Something needed to change.

When I first started it was right in between my home and work, but then after I bought my place it was a bit (not much, but enough) out of the way so that it required a conscious decision to go. Now that I work in the CBD, it is in the opposite direction and required more pre-planning if I was to go after work.

I had a thought, what if I reset what I was doing and started going for walks around my local area? As well as being free, I don’t need to travel anywhere to go for a walk, I just go. I could also mix it up by going different ways, sometimes hilly or sometimes flatter, sometimes through parkland or sometimes past houses…

Over the past two weeks I have gone out seven times, I am going to cancel the gym membership and see how this goes. Things can always change in the future such as getting back into cycling to work or even finding a closer and more convenient gym.