Back in the Saddle Again

After being off my bicycle for a few months and gaining the 7lbs back plus change, I'm back on it again. Last time I was out back in March I ended up carrying the bike the last few miles home. I'd noticed the chain start to skip a little but didn't really think much of it until I was riding up a fairly steep street and the pedals locked. In my exhausted state I thought it would be a good idea to step down on the pedal with all my weight to see if they would free it. Bad idea. This ripped the chain off the rear cassette and firmly jammed it all the way around the rear hub between the cassette and spokes. I carried the bike to a friends place close by. I'd been talking with Paul on the phone earlier and had already arranged to call by on my way home for some tea. By the time I got there I needed it.

It just hadn't been a good day at all really. My usual 30 mile run takes me out of Belfast toward Nutts Corner roundabout, on to the International Airport, down into Templepatrick and back to Belfast. A few miles from Nutts Corner I'd got myself a puncture which took around 30 minutes to fix, mostly because I'd never used the mini pump before and couldn't work it out. Half way through trying to repair the puncture, I look up the road and not 20 feet from me and walking slowly toward me was a big shaggy golden haired dog. Now I'm in the middle of nowhere here. Nothing around for miles except a few farm houses and a gas station a mile or so down the road. The dog walked up to me, stopped and just looked at me. I'm thinking to myself, I can't believe this is happening. I'm having a hard time fixing this puncture and now this dog is gonna maul me and there's no one around to help. So I kinda slowly move the bike between me and the dog and as firmly as i can muster without upsetting the beast, tell it to go home. It slowly starts to walk again past me and on down the road. Looking back at me once with a dirty look. I continued on with the fixing. I'd had the good sense to carry and few spare tubes and tyre levers and so on. So it was really just a case of replacing the tube. I'd do the repairing when I got home. I eventually got the new tube in the wheel and the tyre back on the rim and was by this time covered in oil from the chain but was ready to set off again quietly pleased with myself. I got on the bike and looked down the road. I couldn't believe it. There was the dog coming back toward me, only this time with a small carton of milk in it's mouth. The dog had gone to the store a mile down the road and actually got some milk. It walked past me, milk in mouth. Looked at me and walked up the road a hundred yards or so. Crossed the road and disappeared up the lane way to a farm house. Now I'd seen it all.

The rest of the journey went fine until the chain incident. So since then the bike has been in the garage waiting to be repaired. The weight came back on aided by a face stuffing trip accompanying my baybee in California. We'll get into all that later. So this is day 2. To start off I'm just running the turbo trainer in the garage for 30 minutes a day to get the legs turning again. Probably do that for a few weeks until I feel up to going out again. I'm around 12 stones at the moment which is around 168lbs. The goal is to be around 11.5 stones (160lbs) by November which is when I'm back in California. This time I'm gonna try to cut out all the rubbish I usually eat.

We'll see how it goes. I'm not one to get obsessive about these things.