Sorry for the total lack of updates for the last few months, but I do have a range of excuses honest. As I alluded to in my last post way back in early January after a pretty decent 12 months on the bike (at least for me!) 2025 ended with a bit of a whimper. At the end of my last instalment I was just getting over my shoulder surgery and now over 3 months later I’m happy to report that I’ve got practically two working upper appendages again. The old bowling arm isn’t perfect, but its a hell of a lot better than it was before I went under the knife and got up close and personal with the bone file which is a massive relief.

The other main reason for the lack of bike related action was that as soon as I could safely operate a motor vehicle again the airline I work for dispatched me off on a very long and boring 8 week training course which took up nearly all of February and March. While being stuck in a classroom with lots of other sweaty engineers was good in terms of giving my shoulder plenty of time to heal it did mean I could feel all that fitness I’d worked so hard to gain over the previous year slowly leak out of me as I sat google eyed in front of a computer eating crisps trying to stay awake for hours a day 5 days a week. The other fitness killer on these long term courses is the 8 weeks of hotel food and my total inability to prevent myself ordering beer based beverages alongside my evening meal. Add in a few big social nights out that inevitably occur when there’s lots of airline staff congregating in the same hotel and its a wonder I could still manage to throw my leg over the top tube by the time I got home after the final week.

The only thing during those weeks that prevented my BMI approaching that of a baby hippo was one of the worst hotel gyms I’ve ever seen. (And after 30+ years in the travel industry I’ve seen a lot of hotel fitness centre’s). I’ll tell you now if you’re staying in the Marriott Hotel at Luton Airport be prepared to be very underwhelmed by the fitness facilities. I was supposed to be diligently rehabbing my shoulder, but with the weights equipment consisting of one rack of about 10 dumbells of random weights, a single bench and two floor mats with some very ‘interesting’ stains on my exercise options were limited. There were however two decent treadmills so a bit of cardio was an option. The first week I was there I set myself a goal of trying to run 5km a day. Now I’d like to emphasise that there’s no way I could be described as a regular runner, In fact I usually go out of my way to avoid any sort of treadmill based exercise on my rare visits to a gym because I tend to get absolutely killer shin splints after a couple of km’s.

Lets just say my first few attempts at my self imposed 5km a day challenge didn’t go that well. The first attempt took me about 33 minutes which included at least 1/2 km of walking half way through because I was seriously worried my legs were going to fall off. On my second attempt I did manage to run/jog the full 5 km without stopping but the next morning my legs felt worse that they had after my 100km + day on the bike climbing Sal Calobra last September. Getting down the 2 flights of stairs to breakfast was an exercise in sideways walking and wincing while my quads felt as if somebody had welded steel bars into them overnight. My the end of my sojourn in Luton airports finest hotel I did manage to bring my 5km time down to a much more reasonable 27 mins which does go to show that with practice and perseverance absolutely anyone no matter how inept can improve their athletic performance!

All this running did manage to keep the inevitable weight gain from the beer and hotel fried breakfast diet down to reasonable levels so those interminable hours running staring at a blank wall in front of be weren’t totally wasted, and it did keep my cardio fitness at least ticking over. So now I’m back sleeping in my own bed again its way past time to get this years riding properly kicked off and hopefully this time off the bike isn’t going to hold me back too much. As the end of April approaches there has been riding, there’s also been a fair bit of bike fettling and spending of money on new shiny bits which is always a great way to motivate me to ride more….. but I’ll cover that next time.