I used to cycle a lot. In my twenties I was working 38 km from my home and I was a fairly keen cyclist. So cycling to work seemed like the logical thing to do; I got very fit very quickly and soon started to ride audax events at weekends. I was probably doing an average of 400 km a week without much discomfort. My weight was down to just under 12 stone, which for a strapping six footer like me is pretty good. I could eat and drink what I liked and never put on weight. I wasn’t carrying an ounce of spare fat. In short, I was as fit as a butcher’s dog and built like a racing whippet.

Fast forward twelve years…. I’m 38 now (near enough) and have had a gradually diminishing cycling career. I carried on doing the occasional audax after I left my 23 mile commute job, but the last one I did was worse than most of the traditional bad things that have happened to me – it was freezing cold, it rained and by the halfway stage, 100 km from home, I was looking and feeling like that photograph of Tom Simpson on Ventoux - so I stopped doing long rides, and it wasn’t too long before a 200Km audax was no longer an option anyway. Or at least, the only reason I could tell myself I could do one if I wanted was – rather like the heavy smoker who says he could give up tomorrow but never seems to - that I wasn’t daft enough to prove to myself that I couldn’t by trying it. If you see what I mean. I did, however, continue to commute by bicycle.

First I had a 20Km each way spin to West Bromwich from Wolverhampton, which was a good workout but not a pleasant ride, certainly not compared to my 38 km jaunt through the lanes of rural Shropshire which had been my previous experience of cycle commuting. Then I moved on from that job – I was working for an agency at the time, so I was forever working in different places – to somewhere a bit nearer home. And so it seemed to go on, until I was commuting about 10 km each way once or twice a week. Then, I moved away so my commute was too long to cycle (and at 75 miles, even the most hardcore cyclist would think twice about it) and that was the end of my cycling career. For three years. Oh, I thought of myself as a cyclist, even when I started smoking, and as long as I never actually went near a bike, I could persuade myself that I was still a giant of the road. Well, that last bit was probably right, but only in terms of the “giant” bit: it’s amazing how you put weight on when you eat enough to fuel regular cycling without actually doing any. And it’s amazing how hard it is to find the time to do any exercise at all when you’re working a 70 hour week and sleeping four nights in a lorry.

So … eventually I got to the point where I felt I had to do something. I always said the thing that would make me give up smoking was cycling regularly, and I also always said that the thing that would make me start cycling regularly was having a job nearer home that I could cycle to. So that’s what I’ve done. Now I’m working 12 miles up the road and am doing some sensible hours. You don’t make money as a lorry driver by working sensible hours, so as well as wanting to get fit again, I have a financial motive to bike it; last time I looked, Weetabix was cheaper than petrol. And as well as the financial and fitness motives, I’m going to need something to write about in this space every so often. Next time I’ll tell you the story of my first few commutes – not that there’s much to tell – and, with any luck, I’ll have pedalled it at least once more by then.

Till next time,

Reborn Commuter.