And so it begins...

Often when I see people, after telling them about my charity ride this summer, they ask how my training is going. My response so far has been a kind of awkward mumble about not having started properly yet, but planning to do so shortly.

Anyway, I finally started today. Woohoo! Except that it was cold ... and involved lots of cycling.

As part of my training plan (a term I use very loosely) I have signed up for a few sportives. The first of these is in 3 weeks' time. It will be ok, I reckon I can manage 81km. Anyway, I discovered the other day that it is 81 miles, not km. Apparently that is around 120km. Balls.

I decided that, to start with, I was going to ride along the Bristol to Bath cycle path. One of the good things about living in Bristol is having access to a 13-mile traffic free cycle route, so I thought I would make the most of it. I did a couple of trips from my flat to Bath, going off-route a couple of times to get some hill training in.

Generally, it went quite well. I managed around 66.5 km (a bit over 40 miles) and would have been able to go further if I hadn't been short on time. Here are some lessons I learned:

1. After around 30 km I couldn't feel my toes any more because it was so cold;
2. A good windproof jacket is a worthwhile investment - it was worth paying the extra;
3. My gps has something on its display that looks suspiciously like a symbol that the battery is about to die, prompting me to save my ride about three-quarters of the way through in case I lost the whole thing. It turned out there was plenty of juice left.

Other notable things were nearly hitting a squirrel and then a dog running in front of my bike twice - the same dog ... in completely different parts of the cycle path. I also got up to around 27mph at one point (although I was going downhill at the time).

Shout outs:
Once again, thank you to everyone who is helping me with this. A big shout out goes to Sarah for sponsoring me - thank you for your donation.

To anybody else reading this, please visit my fundraising page: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/TomHoldaway. A donation of any size will help a lot. Also, there is a picture of a dog on a bike. I tried to upload a really unflattering selfie taken towards the end of my ride today, but my tech skills let me down spectacularly.

Thank you for reading!