The Bonnie Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond

Well things looked bad this morning: I went to bed at 3am after a long night drinking; I woke up at 7am; and to top it all off I found my front tyre was punctured! Argh!

It didn't bode well for a trip to Loch Lomond at all.

Things got better though. The weather was amazing, probably one of the hottest days of the year. I love this kind of weather as it means I don't have to worry about keeping warm. We set off about 1.45 to meet Douglas at the SECC. The first ten or so miles were really straight forward, we stopped at Mags Cycle Shop for some drinks and chocolate - well we had just caned it along a canal route on mixed terrain.

After the stop though - the legs really didnt want to move again but we managed to get the next 6 miles done without any incident. We soon started to smell the salt air of the sea and then the cooler air from Loch Lomond started to help us fight off the fatigue.

I'm really surprised at the trail - I had thought it was going to be a boring path all the way but thankfully some bits are not paved; other bits are asphalt and theres even a short section of just mud track.

We arrived at Loch Lomond about 2 hours after settings off - meaning we achieved out target 12 miles per hour. This demanded a pint to celebrate, Tom obviously prepared bought us a bottle of Koppaberg Pear Cider from Tullies Bar. Probably the most refreshing pint in the world.

Easy like Sunday morning

Today is a rest day. No exercise. Just lots of carbohydrates and protein. Tomorrow I'll be cycling at least 25 miles - hopefully the full way back too as part of the first endurance test me and the guys I'll be cycling with are doing. We'll set off about 1pm and hopefully make it to the destination by 3pm.

Why a rest day today? Well simple, muscles get tired of doing the same thing every day; they also build energy stores up when you aren't using them. Ahead of the actual event there will be no training for three days but this week as its only a short distance I'll be giving my legs a break.

Remember there's absolutely no point at all in training your muscles to the point of them collapsing. By giving them a days rest you give time for the muscle fibres to strengthen, knit new connections.

There's two types of muscle that will be involved in the training both of which need to be at their peak. There is Fast Twitch muscle and Slow Twitch muscle. Fast Twitch muscles are used to give you a short explosive burst of energy - trouble is regardless of who you are they WILL build up lactic acid fast. Slow Twitch muscles are designed to develop power repeatedly and without fatigue, your neck is a perfect example, it keeps your head up all day and you never really think "God my head is really heavy today".

Giving the Fast Twitch muscles time wont do much - typically they will recover much quicker than you think. Its the Slow Twitch muscles that need to take their time to recover. The same properties that makes the muscle take longer to fatigue mean that it takes longer to remove the build up of lactic acid and other harmful chemicals.

You can speed this up with deep tissue massage and hot/cold cycle baths but seeing as I don't have access to a masseuse and I had to put up with cold showers in early spring for three weeks I am not willing to do either just yet. Maybe closer to the time when I am getting desperate to get that bit extra out of myself.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers...

First things first, to fuel yourself you need to know your body type, everyone bandies about different terms but there are three generally accepted terms (I've simplified them in my own unique way) and note that you may fit a composite of two types instead of neatly into one:

• Ectomorph: normally small framed, with light muscle structure and finds it hard to gain weight.
• Endomorph: large frame, good muscle structure and gains weight more easily.
• Mesomorph: large frame, gains weight easily and less defined muscle structure.

Now, you Endomorphs and Mesomorphs are jammy gits, I hate you, pretty much anything you do to your diet will result in your body coping with the training.

Ectomorphs find it difficult to gain weight if at all. Normally upping your calorie intake by 1000 to 2000 calories a day should suffice.

You need to make sure you are eating the right foods though, 1000 cals of fat is going to harm anyone that eats it. If you need to train and need to gain weight then you should increase the carbs dramatically, and up the protein too.

Another trick I have is to snack at night, your body will normally still digest whilst you are asleep (somewhat slower) but you are expending far fewer calories; pack away some simple carbs and protein before bed and you will gain weight and be able to train properly without risking muscle fatigue as much.

Mr Motivator

It's important no matter what you are training for to remain motivated and ensure that you give it 100% every day. Theres nothing worse than becoming bored with the routine or the exercise you are doing.



I'm pretty lucky that I live near some actually quite pretty parks to cycle through, the advantage of this is that they arent flat like most of the city around them, they have hills and dips too. There's even some mountain bike trails to mix it up.



More important than that though is to ensure that you don't always do the same route. I normally do a mixture of cycling to work and then home (about 14 miles total) or get in around the parks for some killer hill training and use the crossways to make a relatively small park into a much longer route.

The importance of being idle

On waking today I noticed that my arms were stiff from over use - I stupidly pushed myself a bit further than I should have lifting weights and am now suffering from slightly tweaked tendons. Obviously it would be stupid to be lifting weights in this condition. And that brings me on to my point - over training.

Regardless of what type of training you are doing - its important to ensure that you give your body enough time to recover from whatever you put it through before you start again. You don't have to be exercising like this guy to be over training.

The best way I've found to figure out if you are overtraining or not is to check your heartbeat first thing in the morning, if its 10BPM more than your resting rate - today is going to be a rest day as your body is still recovering. That being said, unless you want to be Arnie or Sly then you'd only be lifting weights every second day.

But whats lifting weights got to do with riding a bike? not a lot to be honest, you can ride a bike all your life and never have to lift a weight, but I am taking a different view on this. We don't know what the terrain will be like in Sweden or Norway at all. Some of the roads will be rough. Thats a given. That means standing on the pedals, maybe lifting the bike on to my shoulder for a short distance and thats where upper body strength comes into play. Obviously the legs will be worked constantly from the cycle training but the arms and shoulders are basically relaxed all the time. Lifting weights will help increase their stamina and strength.

At the same time it should help maintain my body size and weight so that I dont become even skinnier than I am!

Pinky, are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Yeah Brain but what would you do with a GPS tracked mobile phone a USB memory stick and a mountain bike?


Answer: Ride 10 miles to your old work place, drop off a memory stick and ride the long way home past some killer hills.





I took the opportunity today to test my endurance now that I've been cycling for a while and decided to set off from home after having only a bowl of cereal for breakfast. This might sound idiotic but I felt it necessary. It would allow me to gauge how my muscles have adapted to cycling and the distances. If I collapsed after 10 miles with muscle cramp, or my legs just couldn't work any more then I'd have to up the training; if I managed the 10 miles out without food or drink and just worked on the stored energy then the signs are good that I'm making progress.



Did I do it? hell yeah! 10 miles out to my old work to drop off a USB memory stick to someone that I borrowed it from ages ago and thats the first time I had any food fuel enter my system since breakfast this morning. On the way back though I had to use a lot more carbs to get me home. I decided though that now I could feel the muscles getting fatigued it was time to hit the killer hills and push them that bit harder - no pain, no gain after all!


On the way home I took a detour past Bellahouston park it has one of Glasgows tallest hills in the middle of it and would make perfect training for my legs and the unknown terrain of Scandinavia this year. Friends have been bugging me for a while to show them how steep the hill is (and I've added camera shots for you this time) but it doesn't quite get the sense of height or steepness when you are viewing a still image. Watch out for the live footage we will get soon!

Hey Presta!

Well given my adventure coming home on thursday night I decided to fit a different set of tubes to my bike...at least this way I would be able to use ANY bike pump/car pump to inflate my tyres and not left doing a half arsed rocky training montage sequence to get home.

I bought the new tubes, took my bike to bits and tried to fit them. They managed to get through the first hole in the rim but not the second one...who designed this bike?!

Never one to give up I got out my trusty drill and started drilling the rims VERY VERY carefully.

The result: a bike with NORMAL valves and me not being left stranded anywhere again. The lesson learned is that we have to ensure that when we do cycle to Norway that we have the right adapters and that the rims of ALL the bikes can take normal Schrader valves instead of the skinny Presta valves.

See what I did with the blog post title now? and you thought I just couldn't spell!

Ah well its all training...

On the way home tonight I suffered the worst luck ever...

Jumped a kerb and then promptly found that my tyre was flat...ARGH! I thought it wouldnt be an issue, I have a pump, a puncture repair kit and used to be a mechanic...

So there I am at the side of the road bike in bits and as I reach for the pump I find its missing. It must have fallen off at some point after leaving work and me getting the puncture but I'll be a monkeys uncle if I am going to go back and look for it.

There I am 5 miles from no-where, a flat tyre and no way to fix it. Damned Presta Valves!

In the end I did what I had to do, shouldered the bike and tried to Jog/Walk home the rest of the way. Hey its exercise and its all for a good cause. Jack didn't have it easy so why should I!

Pushing on...

Ah well with work and a little flare up of crohns I haven't been doing as much cycling as I wanted to. I cycled in to work today and it took me just over 40 mins - no improvement over last week. So for the next 7 days I am vowing that regardless of the weather I will complete two cycles per day - First thing in the morning and then another at about 7pm. With monday being a bank holiday I will be able to increase the distance that day and do about 25-30 miles in the one go to help prepare for August.

No excuses.

No trying to get out of it.

Everything comes second to the cycling - apart from pretty ladies...we all have our priorities in life.

How do we know its not all hot air? GPS Tracking

Obivously there is a concern that the 205 miles is too much and we wont be able to manage it. But we're In a foreign country with no "reliable" witnesses. So how do we prove we did the full distance and that we did it on bikes?


Simple, GPS Tracking. The company I work for has given us some GPS tracking devices which will be able to track and map our progress through the cycle over the 4 days.

This has a two-fold effect; it means you guys can tell exactly what we're doing; how fast we're going; what direction; and give a total distance. It also encourages us on our cycle, after all we know we cant slack off if a few hundred people are monitoring our progress daily.


Its all a bit technical - which I'd like to explain to you but I've long since given up on the technical explanation blog and decided to go with a more discursive one. If you want to know more ask http://www.irw.co.uk/ about Hawkeye and tracking a gps smart phone.


It's not about advertising but about ensuring that we remain motivated through possibly the best experience of our lives. There will be a lot of pain involved for the riders over the 4 days. I can just imagine though the feeling of elation and happiness as we arrive in oslo on day 4 and promptly collapse from fatigue. Yeah; we wont be able to sit for a week but it'll all be worth it.

decisions decisions

A friend told me today that he'd give me £1 a mile for cycling from Gothenburg to Oslo if i had streamers and a bell on my bike and rang the bell every time we came to a town. £205 is a lot of money for a fund raising cycle so I think I may have to go for it...oh dear!

I hate to admit it but the thought of making a fool of myself through two countries is just beyond my abilities - so in compromise I will do it for one day of the cycle which should land him a hefty enough sponsorship bill!

Cheers Jenny - your donation will be warmly received!

Mauro Masochist?

Well it seems all my friends at work have decided to rename me given my latest adventures. They all think I am nuts cycling the 8 miles to work and then 8 miles home each day - when I told them it was training as I was doing 205 miles in four days in August they nearly fell over!

So, where does this leave me? I gotta train hard over the next few months so planning on cycling a few times to Irvine, maybe Largs once and definitely Edinburgh from Glasgow.

If that wasnt bad enough - I've found myself signed up for climbing Ben Nevis in June. If you see me on the news I'll be the one lying upside down in a hundred foot deep gulley!

What daring adventure next? ... hmm... only thing more terrifying than the stuff above is asking a girl out...dare I?