Julie's Boggle

After getting into a fairly good routine of riding to and from work a couple of times a week last summer and autumn, my riding activities were sadly curtailed by the evenings creeping in around October. It’s hard not to feel more vulnerable as a rider in the dark, and Tom wasn’t happy with me riding at night, so I packed it in for the winter. (It was starting to get too cold anyway.)

Once the long days were back, it was really just a case of waiting for the weather to warm up sufficiently – clearly I’m not an all-weather cyclist, so I’m not going to pretend otherwise! Then with Tom away at a programming conference most of last week, I decided it was finally time.

This was my first opportunity to use my cheap bicycle basket that I got hold of towards the end of last year. As I’d be coming home the usual way, I chucked my coat in there with my work bag, and put my change of clothes in my satchel. Once outside with the bike, the first thing I noticed is carrying the bike up our narrow stairs with a full basket is jolly hard! The basket also changes the bike’s dynamics at low speeds requiring a lot of concentration not to end up with the heavier front wheel weaving off on its own mission.

I could feel my lack of fitness as I puffed along Kensington High Street, but fortunately the route gets better from there.

Once over the last hill of Kensington Palace Gardens, I could relax a bit; enjoy the lush green lawns – you’d never guess there was a drought on – and the trees very slowly catching up to spring. (About 50% are still winter-stark, but the rest are in that lovely semi-green state where they’re either covered with half-size leaves or with a green fuzz.) Then on the long downhill gradient through Hyde Park I was accompanied by lots of dramatic galloping sound-effects from the horse-riders on the adjacent riding track.

It’s all quite flat from there, the only real effort is negotiating traffic, and when I got to the bike stands at work, I was pleased to see that I had clocked 42 minutes from start to finish. Not bad at all, and a great start to a new season.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.