I've not been cycling on the road more than up to the common for Parkrun in... around 2.5 months. I lost the love. That and the miserable state of the traffic on the route to work; so many other bikes, so many of them being assholes (running red lights, cutting people up, being wobbly etc.), it just meant I really didn't want to get to work that way.
I finally found enough love to get back on the commuter bike and do it this morning. And it was great! Because we're getting up early anyway at the moment, leaving the house at 06:45 wasn't hard. The traffic on CS7 is not too bad at all at that time and, more importantly, there are far fewer cyclists and those that are out are the more confident and experienced ones (easy way to determine that is to do a cleat count at traffic lights, 4/16 at the last set were not wearing clips of some sort). 45 minutes in, which is pretty zippy for a first time in ages and not putting in masses of effort, and no rage at all. Score one!
(the down side was that my wash bag as work was 1/2 full of shampoo where the bottle cap had been leaking for weeks...)
cleat count, love it :-) Well done for getting back on the bike for what sounds a like "gauntlet run"
ReplyDeleteFrom Wiki - because I never knew where the expression came from ;-):
"Run the gauntlet" "Running the gauntlet" was a military punishment where a soldier or sailor had to pass between a double row of comrades armed with cudgels. The expression is now generally used metaphorically. Gauntlet in this context is unrelated to the "protective glove" meaning, but is instead derived from the Swedish gatlopp ("street run").[3] Because of this difference in the derivation of the word, the expression is sometimes written "running the gantlet".