…OK, it’s not quite the Tour de France, I’m on a ‘foreign’ cycling machine at Brookes gym in Headington, but it’s still something and especially needed after a cycle-free and food-rich week in Brussels.

I’m back home in Oxford for my final orthodontist appointment after a year of invisalign braces and after tomorrow I will be free of the small plastic ‘aligners’ which I’ve been wearing 24 hours a day for the past year. Actually, the aligners aren’t that bad but the small ceramic ‘hooks’ that hold them in place are and I’ll be happy to have my mouth back as it should be – free from foreign objects.

Cycling in an Oxford gym is unsurprisingly like cycling in Kyiv, but the machine has no TV and I don’t have a view of a swimming pool or the chance to swim afterwards.

So, today I decided to use the ‘random’ mode which makes life difficult and then easy at random times throughout my training session and seems to be a good way to build some extra strength and get used to hill climbing etc. I also download a HIT training app and I’ll give that a whirl at the end. It runs for 15 minutes with 3 minute intervals of east gentle cycling and 30 second bursts of super-fast high speed pedalling.

If I survive that, this afternoon we have a meeting to discuss building a wooden house. That should be interesting if a little weird.

Next stop, the sauna.

Oh, and my new silver seatpost and handlebars were waiting for me in Oxford (thanks Velo Orange, Practical Cycles and eBay). When I get bad to Kyiv, it’s time to ‘pimp my ride’.

Eddy.

Training:
60 minutes
‘Random’
15km
419 Calories

15 minutes HIT training

image

What the random mode looks like