Well the answer is literally nowhere really. I just haven’t been riding much at all. I haven’t been injured, had the dreaded ‘C’ word, had all the bikes stolen …….. I just haven’t been riding. Since the last MTB ride I did at the end of January Strava tells me I’ve ridden my road bike precisely twice, and the Mountain Bike is sitting on deflated tubeless tyres at the back of the shed with January’s trail mud still glued to it.

There are some mitigating factors. Firstly my boss suckered me into applying for a job I didn’t really want at work ‘to pad out the field a bit and keep the front runners honest’ , then in a stunning act of betrayal and despite me conspicuously failing to wear a tie to the interview he gave me the position. This to my slight chagrin has resulted in me having to put more hours and effort in at work than I’ve really needed to for several years. ( I should also point out that this isn’t a life changing ‘oh my god my careers finally taken off’ promotion, this is a position I previously held about 10 years ago and was demoted from after being deemed ‘awkward’ by senior management)

Secondly I’ve several other demands on my free time / hobbies / projects at home that have all needed a bit more effort and input lately. I’ve been making a mess of restoring a classic car for far longer than I really want to think about and with the end of almost 5 years of torturous body work in sight I’ve been spending a lot of my free time grinding back blobby MIG welds in a big push to get some paint back on the body shell this summer. Then I got given a small wood turning lathe last Christmas and discovered a hitherto undiscovered nack for making small wooden bowls that are slowly taking over the spare shelf space in the house……

Thirdly, for the last four years I’ve been working away from home and instead of spending money renting a flat or living in AirBnB’s we bought a Narrowboat for me to live on during my 4 days / nights at work. Typically for me I bought the one of the first boats I looked at with a view to using it for family holidays which over the last 4 years has happened precisely once. In fact after that first boating experience two of my children actually left the country so they wont have to go again. Realising that the boating life for me was going to be a single man’s pursuit led to the sale of my floating home in favour of a much smaller and thus cheaper one to keep and heat etc. What I didn’t factor in was just what a time consuming process selling one boat and buying another was going to be. And then of course the new boat needed moving to the marina I moor at which took several days, and I managed to buy a boat that inevitably needed quite a lot of work (but was a bargain honest) which meant lots of free time got swallowed up by woodwork and sawdust.

Fourthly, I just didn’t really want to….. ride I mean. Not really sure why, yes all the stuff mentioned above certainly contributed, but I’ve been busy before and always made the time. I just didn’t feel like it. I haven’t even been riding indoors on Zwift. If I had a spare hour I found myself turning a bowl on the lathe or making badly thought out and worse fitting bookcases for the new boat. Before I knew it I hadn’t ridden at all for over a month…. Then of course the little voice started in my head whenever I did contemplate donning Lycra again…. You know the voice that says ‘it’s going to really hurt now…..you’ve lost all your fitness….. you’ll have lost loads of power…. Your butt is going to really hurt after 5 minutes on that saddle…. It looks like it might rain……. It’s a lot of faff getting ready…… you cant remember your Zwift password its been so long…… bet you get cramp really badly…… lets just lie on the bed for an hour and watch YouTube instead…..’

Listening to this little voice (and being quite busy as previously explained) has led to almost 4 months of zero pedal action. I think I’m coming out of it now, hopefully a metaphorical corner has been turned.

How so? Well the car project has stalled again because the welding is as finished as I’m ever going to get it and now I’m basically scared of painting the thing in case I stuff it up…… so I’m avoiding going in the garage because looking at the car makes me feel guilty. This means because I’m not going in the garage I’m not using the lathe so the making of piles of wood shavings isn’t distracting me either. The new boat is floating on its mooring quite happily and I’ve finished enough of the interior renovations to make it liveable on to the point were I can put of the rest of the jobs almost indefinitely. The excuse fest is thinning out. Finally the weather has been so glorious the last few days I’ve been at home it would have been a crime not to ride, so I did and it was nowhere near as bad as that little voice said it would be.

Yes, I’ve undoubtedly lost quite a bit of riding fitness but that’s not the end of the world. After all there’s nothing I’m really training for, and now I’ve ridden a couple of times and found out I can still turn the pedals the psychological barrier keeping me off the bike seems to have been breached.

The other thing that’s helped reignite my pedalling passions is of course buying another bike I don’t really need. Yes its from eBay, not of course its not new or even fully working, but that’s another story.