My First Bike Ride After 2 Years
Running is my new passion, but the truth is: you can’t rund every single day. One of my strategies is to alternate different sporting activities so that I use different muscle groups while building endurance and stamina. That’s why on a beautiful Friday afternoon I took advantage of the great spring weather and went on my first bike ride after 2 years.
Cycling is not necessarily new to me. I was doing some cycling even during the times I was obese, but not on a very consistent basis. Still, I’m used to this type of effort, as I’m doing this for more than 20 years. As I always say: “the body never forgets”, so I was not sure how exactly to approach this bike ride.
On one hand I wanted to build up fitness, therefore I needed a mostly Z3 effort. But on the other hand two years is a very long time and there was a great chance my muscles would hurt afterwards. And the day after I had planned a long run.
Choosing The Route
One of the downsides of living in Romania is that you don’t really have a lot of cycling pathways outside the main cities. But fortunately we have one along the Bega river that goes all the way to the border with Serbia.
At a certain point, there’s a lock on the river. I already knew the distance from my home to the lock would be around 12 km. Therefore, a total of around 24 km on the unregular tarmac of the cycling path would be a good way to go for my first bike ride in 2 years.
As I was heading out, my main focus was to not push too hard, yet keep my heart working. Looking at speeds might get in the way, because it’s only natural that you would want to always go faster. Also, as you can see, I have a Cannondale mountain bike and it’s normal to ride slower than with a road bike. Therefore, I decided to never look at my speed, but just at my heart rate.
On the way to the lock on the river everything was going smoother than I expected. It almost felt like I never had a 2 years break. However, on the way back, well, I had some very slight headwind. Slight but good enough to make an untrained cyclist suffer a little more. I needed to shift one gear down to keep my heart rate consistent and not go over 150 bpm. And my muscles started to hurt a little.
The good thing is that 24 km is not very long and I soon had the bike ride behind me. When checking the final stats on my Garmin Connect and Strava, I noticed I had an average speed of 17.4 km/h, which was way more than I expected given the circumstances.
Now I need to make sure that I alternate frequently enough beetween running and cycling. In the end, both of them are important if I want to compete in a triathlon at a certain point. But what aboud you? Do you alternat running and cycling? How does it feel? Would you have any advice for me? Let me know in the comments!
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