So the winter training and fitness plan of riding my bikes as much as possible while also going to the gym for finely honed and focused strength training to address my myriad of physical weaknesses has been going really well lately…………… not…….

Yes in the last couple of months I have achieved precisely zero miles on the bike and zero visits to the gym. It’s fair to say that my winter training is going worse than Manchester United’s current bid for the Premiership Title, But in a similar vein to a Mr Ten Hag press conference I’m now going to trot out a fairly long list of what some harsh people would term excuses, but I prefer to think of as mitigating factors.

The first hump in the march towards my fitness goals was my employer suddenly deciding that all the people roughly my grade of lower / middle level ‘Leaders’ in the engineering arm of our airline really needed some in-depth ‘leadership training’ to better understand how to ‘lead our teams better, while understanding ourselves at a deeper level and helping to develop our own authentic leadership styles’ Precisely what they expected a bunch of mainly 40 – 50 year old engineers to learn from this holistic approach to the job most of us have been doing for years was and is still a topic hotly debated, but for almost a week I found myself and my fellow ‘leaders’ trapped in a farm house in the middle of the French countryside undertaking workshops in meditation, team building and most bizarrely listening to Pan Pipe music (performed live) inside a pitch black cave complex deep underground and miles from the nearest civilisation.

This whole experience is probably worthy of its own in-depth article, but lets just say in the true spirit of middle aged hairy knuckle dragging engineers the world over what we lacked in engagement on the meditation side we made up for in the alcohol consumption stakes in the evenings much to the consternation of the extremely earnest and well meaning course instructors who were completely bamboozled by the rapid deterioration of the level in intellectual debate every evening once the bottle opener came out of the drawer.

Anyway, as karma for falling asleep and snoring loudly in the group meditation session in the dark cave of dampness I returned from France with the mother of all colds instead of a renewed sense of inner calm. This was a serious case of man-flu which soon had me feeling abjectly sorry for myself as only a middle aged man can. To make matters even worse I’d booked the week off work after I’d returned from France and was planning to use the time off to get some serious training in both on the turbo trainer and in the gym, but I ended up spending most of the week in bed coughing any fitness I’d retained out from the depths of my lungs and feeling very sorry for myself.

So that was a couple of weeks written off. Then just as my cough was showing signs of abating and I wasn’t counting the hours down tom my next Lemsip dose we received a pretty urgent SOS from our eldest off-spring who lives about 4 hours away at the other end of the UK. Like me he’d reported feeling ‘a bit under the weather’ for the previous week but he’d finally bowed to the inevitable (and his mothers pressure) and taken himself to the doctors who had taken one look at him and packed him off to the local hospital for tests. The diagnosis of Pneumonia combined with the asthma he’s unfortunately always suffered from comprehensively trumped my lingering cold and saw me jumping straight in the car for a dash down the UK’s fun motorway network to return him to the caring bosom of his family for some time of bed rest and recuperation in his old bedroom complete with parentally funded central heating while he waited for the killer dose of antibiotics to get his chest back inline.

Then I had to go back to work which meant backing my bags and returning to the Midlands to live on my Narrowboat for a week. When I returned home much to everyones relief Son #1 was showing signs of improvement (but was still ‘not right’ to paraphrase his mother), but son #2 (still at home doing his A levels, also asthmatic ) was showing signs of being the lurgies next victim. Sure enough, the next 10 days or so resulted in a couple of doctors visits, time off school shivering in bed, misery, a course of antibiotics for a chest infection and two courses of steroids to bring his asthma back under control. Its a bit mean to disappear on your bike all day or to the gym when theres multiple pills and medicine to be dispensed at regular intervals to shivering off-spring spending all day cocooned in their duvets so that accounted for another couple of weeks of zero riding or fitness activity.

Of course in the back ground of all this germ laden doom Christmas was remorselessly approaching so when my poor wife and I weren’t ministering to the sick there was the usual holiday preparations to attend to. Decorations had to be exhumed from the depths of the loft, the tree had to be purchased, the house had to be reconfigured to accept more family members than I remembered inviting etc etc. It’s was to put it mildly a pretty manic few weeks.

As I’m writing this now post Christmas the worse of the storm seems hopefully to be behind us. The festive guests have departed, the excess Christmas food has gone into the recycling bin, and everyone seems to be on the mend. Poor Mrs Declining Cyclist started to come down with the family cold just before Christmas but in true unassuming mother of the family style she pressed on by mainlining paracetamol and refusing to slow down thereby managing to put the males of the family to shame by powering through without requiring buckets of sympathy and 24 hour nursing care…..

So, this is a vey long winded way of saying the last few weeks have been a total write off in my carefully crafted fitness gains plan and going into the new year I’m most certainly not in a great place fitness wise, but a a wise man once said ‘it is what it is’ .Theres no point crying over lost watts and when I do eventually carve out a bit of time on the bike or in the gym I’m going to have to reset some expectations. The danger is after a layoff like this that the first session back you think ‘right, must make up for lost time now, this instant, straight away!’ and immediately you end up injuring yourself trying to hit the points / weights you could manage before the injury or illness. I know I’ve done this to myself in the past and I’m determined not to make the same mistakes this time.

Having said that I was also determined not to drink too much or rediscover my love of French tobacco on that leadership course and due to my legendary will of wet cardboard that didn’t end very well either. Once I’ve got back in the gym or on the bike I’ll report back on how bad things really are fitness wise, but I know there most certainly more work to do that there was a couple of months ago.