City's Backsides

I ride and I ride in the words of the master that is Iggy Pop.

I took part in a charitable endeavour.  Actually, I felt a bit of a fraud.  The Sport Relief Manchester Cycle was a 50 mile trundle through the flatlands of the city and out into Cheshire wastes (sorry, should that be plains do you think?).  It was not overly onerous and it felt wrong to ask my nearest and dearest to give me money to do the thing I enjoy doing.  Riding my bike.

I tried to make it seem like a torturous ordeal.  For example, I added mileage by riding 5 miles to the start and 5 miles back again when I'd finished.  I did it wearing a half hearted attempt at a fancy dress costume, but it did involve a shortie cape.  And I did it despite the hideous weather conditions with stinging hail whipping into my face, and visibility so horrid that I did ride with lights on in the middle of the day.  But it still felt like a fraudulent endeavour because I was still simply riding my bike, pretty much like I do every weekend.

Anyway, for charity, as it were, I paid a £35 entry fee and I sponsored myself half the target amount to hide my embarrassment in asking mates to give me money.

In a selfish world, it too added mileage.  I like a bit of mileage.  I've always been a bit of a numbers obsessive since the first ever bike computer I owned which was about £2.99 from a local supermarket. Magnet on the wheel, wire to the handlebars and seemingly a battery which lasted for ever.  I used to get home from every commute and update a spreadsheet; how many miles had I done, what was my average speed, what was my fastest speed, how long had the journey taken.  I like tangible proof of what I'm doing and some kind of motivation to try to get a little bit fitter, to go a little bit faster, all in all, to be better.  Nothing wrong with striving to be better after all.

The numbers obsession gets worse and worse as technology provides more options.  When I first started bike commuting I didn't even own a mobile phone.  Now the phone tells me just what I've done, and shows me the same stretches of road and the speeds achieved day by day by day.  It's an obsessive's dream come true.  Or nightmare come true.

In true form, I have a mileage target and am obsessively planning and monitoring.  40 days, 1200 kilometres to achieve.  It's a Strava thing.  I know that there are 33 days to go of the challenge.  I know we are 17% of the way through the days, and I know that my mileage (kilometreage sounds wrong) is at 17% of the total, and I know it's that way because I planned that it should be so.  It's like providing a squirrel with a pile of acorns and expecting it to just take what it needs, but instead, of course, one by one it removes each acorn from the pile and one by one places these in its own carefully selected storage place.  It can't just leave the pile be.  They are there to be taken.  So are the miles.  The piles of miles.

Still, hopefully it's making me fitter and hopefully it'll make me thinner too.  I live in hope.