Revolution-ary experiences

Yep the clue (or pun) is in the title - I will be blogging more about cycling today!

I did a dummy run on Easter Sunday up to the office with bf, sat on the steps for a while to have a drink and recover and then cycled back. By the time I got home I was acutely aware of what my mother delicately calls the "sitting bones". Now, you'd have thought that anything that involved sitting would be something that was finely honed in me, but sitting on a saddle reveals a whole new world of pain that I'd never imagined. I asked the bf - a lapsed but knowledgeable former cyclist - about this and he says the pain does get better: "I don't know if the area hardens up or something" - eeek! On the one hand, hardened ladybits sound thoroughly undesirable and not a bit un-scary, but on the other, a painful pelvic region is not a pleasant experience either!

We went out again yesterday for what turned into just short of a 3 hour non-stop cycle ride (got a bit lost and went down a canal the wrong way). I took some ibuprofen before I went out for my sore 'sitting bones' and various other tender bits and bf said that the first c10 mins would be painful and then it would go numb. Again, numb ladybits is a double edged sword (or was that just how my saddle felt?!) but it was true right up until almost the end of the ride when I was definitely getting the sensation of pins and needles. And if that sounds anything other than entirely unpleasant and downright odd, you're wrong! And I had bought my saddle on the spot when the cycling man said it was "as close to an armchair you can get on a bike" - a winning sales technique if ever I heard one.

Cycling brings a range of other conundrums I hadn't anticipated - for instance, I have to buy more t-shirts since all my plain cotton ones that I thought would be good are obediently scoop or v-necked, as prescribed for women of bosom, but which therefore flash my sports bra in a very unattractive way. I guess that given that even on my type of bike you are leaning forward slightly, a lower neck could be dangerous/distracting/embarrassing/inappropriate/all of the above. And my cycling sartorial policy - which can be encapsulated as Anything But Lycra - is under attack from a sudden wistfulness for extra padding in the, er, sitting bone area. Who'd ever thought that someone with as much extra padding naturally as me could require yet more of an artificial nature?! Perhaps there's some sort of bizarre cosmetic surgery where they suck fat out of, ooh, my thighs/stomach/ass and redistribute it to .... well, you get the point (2 points actually if you look at a skeleton's pelvic region).

All the cycling, plus a 6.5mile walk, does not seem to have balanced the chocolate etc consumption though, as my waistband is feeling rather tight today. I have to get back on - and stay on - that ole wagon called diet. Happily (or maybe not, depending on your viewpoint) I only have one sitting's worth of chocolate egg to despatch (and no, that's not 3 entire family size eggs but less than one shell and 4 little mini eggs) and then I'm really going to have to knuckle under or I very much fear my summer skirts won't fit.

Hopefully the cycling will have some impact - and one plus is that I have enjoyed cycling in a way I never enjoyed running so it should be easier to keep it going as a lifestyle choice (as I believe they say in magazines). I ran for just over a year, hating every minute so I'm confident that I can keep the cycling going. I think it will take a bit over an hour each way to commute in to begin with but hopefully I can get the time down - I know it will be nicer than commuting (a woman tutted loudly at me this morning just because the oyster card readers rejected my card!) but I do hope it burns calories, fat and generally helps me get into my summer wardrobe and develop limbs of a supermodel. But I'd settle for getting into my summer wardrobe (and by this I mean the clothes, I'm not quite at the stage where I wouldn't fit in a cupboard! Although I'm pretty confident that I could eat my way into that if I weren't careful).