July was another decent month riding wise with a grand total of 493.94 km under the wheels. 329.90km out on the still ludicrously warm and sunny UK roads, and couple of outings on the MTB totalling just 46.60km and a respectable 117.44km indoors on Zwift. I’m still finding Zwift a super effective workout tool as I try desperately to build some sort of climbing fitness before heading out back to Majorca and its scary steep and long climbs at the end of the summer.

What I can’t do on Zwift is long rides, after anymore than an hour and a half max on the indoor trainer I’m totally done both mentally and physically. Mentally after that time no matter what I’m doing either a structured workout or a specific route I’m so bored that in my head I’m completely checked out, and physically that’s around the time that my backside starts telling me that I’ve been sitting on the Zwift Rides saddle as long as I can tolerate.

In other riding news some time ago I acquired a second hand Insta 360 action cam which had sat unused since I realised that I couldn’t be really bothered to read the instructions. I’d had wild notions of just throwing together some ‘banging’ riding content after my kids had told be that making viral Instagram reels and ticktock videos was the way forward and ‘super easy Dad, everyone is doing this stuff’ Anyway last month I finally charged up the camera and clipped it to the front of my jersey before setting off for a ride. When I got home I managed to read enough of the online instructions to download the Insta360 app and after spending what seemed like a very long time faffing around on my phone I managed to produce a 30 second clip of me struggling and ultimately failing to ride up a very steep local hill called Mow Cop which has an incline well into double digits. I even managed to get the screen to show data from my Garmin watch which showed my heart rate, the incline and my tortoise like speed……

Now I’m not very active on social media, I’ll freely admit that the compulsive need to post pictures of my breakfast, lunch and dinner along side artfully composed shots of the sunset with a motivational quote thrown in has never really been my thing, but I’m not a total Luddite – I do have Facebook and Instagram accounts, but apart from my bad habit of scrolling Facebook Marketplace for bargain bicycles I don’t often post anything. So when I uploaded my little video to Facebook reels I wasn’t expecting much, maybe the odd comment from a friend or two gently laughing at me if I was lucky. How wrong I was. For the next almost 3 weeks my phone seemed to be constantly chiming with notifications. I even had to turn the damn thing onto silent mode at night to stop it pinging away in the small hours of the morning. Last time I looked the reel had nearly 60,000 views, 66 comments and over 400 likes. Now although that’s not really what you’d call a viral video with billions of views, but for little old me that was an almost uncomfortable level of interest. Anyway, here’s the video in question if you want to take a look –

The main reason the clip seemed to generate so much interest was what an awful lot of people viewed as my abnormally high heartrate, I had lots of messages asking if I was in fact actually in cardiac arrest when the video was taken, and after replying to a few people trying to reassure them that I’d always had a high heart rate when exercising and that I could in fact get over 200bpm if I really went for it just seemed to whip up more controversy so I just stopped replying to people worried I was about to die and the comments eventually dropped off, I guess new funny cat video’s pushed me wheezing up a hill down peoples playlists.

So that was my minor brush with internet fame last month……