The End Of The Beginning - Part Deux

16 Weeks of training and this is what it all boils down to:

The accountant in me can't resist good old fashioned cold hard statistics, and I just had to share them with you.  Never mind how it all felt - the pain, the highs and lows, the emotion, the excitement of beating targets, the psychological scarring - that's all for another day.  Results are what's important today!!!

Before we started the formal training my weight was down to just over 13stone (83 kilos) - no longer clinically obese but apparently I still needed to lose a stone.  After a few weeks we did our first gym test - my body fat was 22.9% - not bad but I wanted it below 20% for the start of the ride.

The training programme increased steadily over the weeks until we were cycling over 24 hours a week in each of the last 3 weeks.  In theory, completion of every single ride would require you to cycle 5,630km. 

Not quite in the order prescribed by Sgt. Major Curry, and also not quite sure how I managed it, but I managed to clock in at just over 5,540km.  All I can tell you is that my old knees feel like they've done at least twice that!

To put it into context that's the equivalent of cycling from London to New York or, for my southern hemisphere friends, the same as cycling around the coast of Australia from Adelaide to Cookstown.

For those of you who don't know Malta, I can tell you it's not a big place - those that do will tell you that's quite an under-statement!  Cycling that far on an island 27km by 14km without the repetition driving you insane is a challenge, let me tell you.

It's also a surprisingly hilly place - climbing over 52,000 metres is almost the same as scaling 6 Mount Everests - if only I'd done it one climb I'm sure I'd feel a little more prepared for The Alps!!

There's not a lot to do while you're on your bike - chatting to the other riders sometimes, listening to an iPod, but mostly just lost in your thoughts - never a good thing in my case!  Now, it's not that getting fit and preparing for LifeCycle isn't productive enough, but I did wonder what else I could have done while I sat on that saddle for nearly 250 hours.  Turns out I could have become fluent in French, and probably Spanish too if I'd had something educational on that iPod instead of The Monkees.

And the best bit - over 200,000 calories burnt in the process - that bought me an extra 80 days food consumption without putting on a single pound!!!

Lenny likes to finish off a ride with a visit to his local Burger King, which doesn't immediately spring to my mind as the most logical thing to do after doing something healthy.  But then he can cycle at 30kmh and I can't so who am I to question him? 

It turns out that, If I followed suit, I could have eaten twice my own body weight in Double Whoppers with Bacon - thats 280 burgers - and still been able to eat a normal days food every day :)

But for the more health conscious it also means that I could have eaten 177 kilos of cous cous - two and a half times my body weight - all joking aside I probably wasn't too far off :)


We have also all been doing our final gym tests too.  I'm happy to tell you that I managed to get down to the 76 kilo mark - and am now the "normal" weight for my height.  Bearing in mind just how extreme my  training has been to get there I can't believe that's right - nobody in their right mind would want to do this just to be their ideal weight would they?

I also managed to get my body fat down to 16.9% - I never thought I'd say this but it's amazing how easy it is to become a little obsessed with this stuff.  Once you start to see weight falling off you really want to keep it going.  Many people think the training must be great because you can eat whatever you want, but the reality is that it's the last thing you want to do.  All that effort to get stronger and leaner, and then waste it by eating something bad?  Crazy talk!!!

That said, I think I'm not alone this week in slacking off a little with the diet, even though we aren't doing as much training.  With what's to come I'd guess we're all comfortable with the idea that a few extra calories now will soon get used up next week - here Lee's adopting the Magnum route.

Watching the team in action on the Sunday rides you can see the difference in everyone - stronger, faster, fitter and more focussed than when we started all the way back in April. Which is probably good because having done the first 5,500km in 110 days we have to do the next 2,100 in just 11 days!

So, it's been a really tough 4 months but the training is over, the targets have, largely, been met and I think it's fair to say we're as prepared as we could be for the challenge  ahead.  Famous last words......