Spinning the length of the U.K.

The picture above will make sense when you get to the end of this post!

Today's training session was a little different. One hour on the spin bike, but not in the gym. Nope: outside the University Union, heckling passers-by to give money. Turns out if you just point at people and make eye-contact the guilt is too much for them to bear.

It's one of the fundraising ideas for Project Zambia: the team (with a little help from various staff from the Sports Centre and me, of course) are cycling the length of the U.K. on spin bikes, which basically means all the hard work with none of the scenery. Well, maybe not all the hard work: there are no climbs after all (unlike the Bealach race, which I'll be doing next month).

It made for quite a light session, since the bikes don't calculate the distance covered in relation to output wattage, but in relation to pedaling cadence. In its own way that proved to be a good workout: I kept a cadence of about 120 for most of the hour (i.e., each pedal goes round 120 times per minute). It's a good discipline to push the cadence up like that, although 100-110 is probably a more efficient rate, and on the climbs I tend to drop down to 90.

Should get out on the open road tomorrow, and hopefully do a bit of climbing. At least my weight is back down to where it should be. I'd quite like to trim another kilo of my weight (maybe two), but that requires a bit more discipline with food than I generally show. How Bale did it for the Machinist movie, I'll never fathom.

Motivational reading this week? A biography of Robert Millar, the great Scottish cyclist who was King of the Mountains in the '84 Tour de France. That's him pictured above, in the glory days of team outfits! (Picture from Cycling Weekly). A remarkable guy by all accounts, especially in terms of his meticulous dieting.