So, lockdown and Covid19 suck. I think pretty much the whole wide world is with me on this one. When will the world return to normal? Will it ever return to normal? What is normal anyway? Is this now the new normal?

Woah, super heavy stuff there. Don’t worry this isn’t going to turn into so existential questioning our existence type of blog….. not sure what happened to me there, must be spending to much time on the turbo with my thoughts set to wander mode. ( Don’t worry won’t happen again I promise……..)

So, where was I? Oh yes Lockdown KOM’s. So a month or so ago this became a very unexpected obsession for me over the course of a couple of weeks. This is not the sort of cycling obsession I thought would would ever become a problem for me, so bear with me while I try and explain – first, let me set the scene for you………

I suspect like a lot of people lockdown has unexpectedly given me what we would have called back in the day ‘Miles in the legs’ Although I’ve been lucky enough to have be retained at work throughout the crisis I have been working substantially less hours that usual for this time of year, combine this with literally hardly ever leaving the house when I wasn’t at work translated to a lot of Zwifting time for methroughout April and May. As the family got into a lockdown routine (there’s 5 of us in the house) I found myself spending at least an hour a day flogging myself round various Zwift courses. I wasn’t riding outside because in these early days of strict lockdown when outdoor exercise was supposed to be limited to an hour we took to taking a family walk in the evenings to get us all out of the house to preserve our sanity and separate the kids from the WiFi. It also seemed selfish to risk falling off or having a silly crash when the news was wall to wall coverage of struggling hospitals and poor Doctors and Nurses who looked like they had quite enough on their plates already without treating cyclists self – inflicted gravel rash.

In fact reviewing my Strava stats for late March to mid April shows nearly 230 miles logged in Zwift which is pretty significant time on the bike for me – far more than I’d usually manage indoors or out. So when I finally started to venture outside to ride again towards the end of April I was already noticing some lockdown gains, I’d dropped quite a bit of weight and Strava was telling me I was doing times around the virtual world of Zwift that I hadn’t come close to for literally years.

At first these out door rides were strict 1 hour door to door affairs ridden very conservatively while feeling absurdly guilty about riding outside at all. It did feel a bit like being in one of those cheap straight to video post apocalyptic zombie movies when our hero wakes up from a mystery coma and wanders gormlessly around a deserted city wondering where everyone else is….. As the lockdown restrictions started to ease as we rolled into the summer and the 1 hour limit on exercise in the UK was removed I started to venture further afield and the distance and intensity of the rides slowly and inexorably started to ratchet up. Then I got sick….. not Covid sick (but the high temperature and sore throat led to me being tested and an anxious 48 hours waiting for the thankfully negative result) A nasty bout of tonsillitis and a long course of antibiotics kept me off the bike and on the toilet for a week which had the side effect of bringing my weight down to levels which I hadn’t been close to for 20 odd years. When I did get back on the bike and got my strength back I found something quite odd had happened.

Quite simply I think my 47 year old body remembered that it used to be quite good at cycling and the the muscle memory which had long laid dormant was gently stirring. Riding my bike was once again almost becoming second nature. Yes it was still hard, yes it still made me ache and breathe far too heavily through my nose in extremis, but these minor exercise induced inconveniences didn’t seem to matter as much. I was to sound a little hipsterish and almost trite ‘becoming at one with my bike’ once again. (Now I’ve typed that it sounds incredibly stupid, but that’s the best description I can come up with ok). Oh, and my times around the local lanes just kept improving. Now don’t panic we are not talking about previously unheard of performances for my gender and age group that were going to make British Cycling appear on my doorstep, but it was gently pleasing to see the little Strava ‘PR’ rosettes popping up when my Garmin finished uploading my rides when I got home. I do confess I did start to look forward to scrolling through the Strava data on my phone as part of my post ride ritual, where as pre-lockdown I hardly ever looked post ride because there was very little worth pondering over.

Then one ride it happened. Perusing the post ride segment times I noticed a little gold cup next to one. Not seen that before ….. lets click on it and see what it means………….TOP TEN!!!!!! I’m only in the TOP TEN EVER FOR THAT SEGMENT !!!!!! (I may have done a little undignified jig round the room at this point, I cant quite remember) You have to realise that for somebody that is usually languishing in the top two thousand or so on a reasonably popular local segment this was a pretty big deal in my unusually narrowly focused lockdown life. When I did calm down a bit and analyse the data a bit closer it was a bit of a letdown to realise that my crowning achievement had only put me in the top ten of a very small segment down a little residential road in my village that only 287 other people had recorded a time on. (At this realisation I stopped mentally composing my comeback press release in Cycling Weekly Magazine) Still, I was now officially the 8th fastest person ever down the very short Brookfield Drive with a time end to end of 36 seconds! (Told you it was a short segment) The current KOM was 30 seconds dead, was it possible to shave whole 6 seconds off my time? It must be surely, after all I’d set my top ten time when I didn’t even realise I was on the cusp of local cycling legend status – 6 seconds should be easy to find now I was super motivated. To add even more spice when I proudly showed my name on the leaderboard to my youngest son he pointed out that the current KOM holder was the Dad of one of his class mates (who I didn’t even realise rode as well) Declining Cyclist Junior told me in no uncertain terms that he expected me to wrest this title from its current owner – family honour and him rubbing his mates nose in it demanded it! No pressure then…….

Annoyingly 6 seconds proved quite hard to come by, and this is when I started to display the beginnings of obsessive / compulsive behaviour. Every ride now had to encompass this segment. I started going out of my way to include it, and even started to base whole rides around it. I brought my time down to 32 seconds quite quickly now I was on max attack mode every time I rode it but the last 2 seconds were proving elusive. I was now in second place overall which made my inability to eek out that last couple of seconds even more frustrating. This is when I started to take some silly risks. To give you some context, the battlefield I was entrenched in is a short quiet residential road with bungalows and a Nursing home on, you turn onto it off the main road through the village and after a flat section past the Nursing home it dips down to a ‘T’ junction with another main road. Total length of the segment is according to Strava a whopping 0.1 miles! The KOM is 30 seconds and my best time was 32.

The first questionable step in my quest for glory was taking ever increasing risks taking the 90 degree left turn into the segment off the main road. I started swinging out ever wider on the approach so I could carry as much speed as possible, then after laying the bike over hard I’d End up sprinting like a manic on the wrong side of the road for a few hundred yards after needing the full width of the road on the exit. I’d then go is to full head down bum in the air sprint mode for as long as I could before hitting the brakes as late and as hard as I dared before the T junction at the other end of the road. This was fine during the traffic free days at the peak of lockdown, but as the restrictions started to ease this all or nothing approach started to show some downsides.

The first issue was that I’d totally forgotten that there might be the possibility of meeting other road users or even pedestrians as more people started to emerge from their Covid imposed hibernation. I had as very close call with a startled senior citizen who when she perfectly legitimately started to cross road couldn’t have dreamt that a Lycra clad loony would appear from nowhere not looking where he was going and miss her and her shopping bag by inches……. Then there was the morning when I had to lock both wheels to avoid hitting the back of a parked car I simply hadn’t noticed in my red mist obscured vision till it was almost to late.

And the rage, well the inner rage I was experiencing if my quest for glory was thwarted was really quite alarming. The early morning attempt I made on day in an effort to avoid people related conflicts was dashed because I met the bin lorry coming the other way, this set back produced an almost Bradley Wiggins level strop and some language at high volume which must have woken up the residents at the care home at the top of the street. The next time I tried I had to brake to avoid somebody backing their car off their driveway, again the air turned blue as I turned into Mr Angry again….. This was clearly getting out of hand and I needed to have a serious talk with myself. It was even taking the edge of the increased fun I was having on the bike thanks to my improving fitness. I was in short turning into the sort of rider I’d always secretly despised, a data obsessed record chasing robot. Things I promised myself would have to change – but like a junkie who’s promised himself on last fix before checking into rehab I had to have one last attempt.

I promised myself I’d only try one more time, so for the next few rides I avoided the segment unless I felt as if there was a realistic chance of finding those last 2 seconds. If the wind wasn’t favourable or I was feeling a little heavy legged I just went a different way home. Then came the day. No wind to speak of. The legs had felt good all ride. It was early on a Sunday morning so hopefully no traffic and definitely no bin lorries……. was as my daughter likes to say ‘my time to shine’

I nailed the turn into the road with as much speed as my tyres and mediocre bike handling would let me carry. The legs managed to keep the big ring churning round, and I stayed off the brakes so long I ended up pulling a very inelegant stoppie to prevent myself over-shooting the junction at the end. That was it. I was both pretty confident that I was close, and that there was no more time to be had. Whatever the time was would be my personal limit. There was no way I was going any faster anytime soon.

In fact I was so fatalistic about the whole thing that I didn’t even check the Strava data till after a very long shower and the family Sunday roast. The result? 30 seconds dead. Tied for first place which My son told me witheringly wasn’t quite good enough to get him ‘my dads faster than yours’ boasting rights at school. I may have ultimately come up a little short, but that last ride somehow exorcised the demon on my shoulder / broke the spell / set me free from the tyranny of Strava. Pick which ever seems appropriate! I’ll always have this screen shot…….

Postscript: – When I finished writing this post I checked the Strava segment for the first time in awhile….. and some Jonnycomelately has knocked another 2 seconds off the KOM. So I’m now in joint second place LOL!