This week I discovered that the Strava cycling app publishes a summary of your cycling year. I've saved my story to youtube (see link below) so that I can compare my 2015 year with my 2014 year and hope to see some improvements!
One statistic that amazed me on my app is that I have one real Queen of the Mountains (QOM) award, not just a fake 1st Jan QOM 2015 award.
I investigated this a little further and found that the hill where I achieved my award is an obscure little street in a town, where undoubtedly no other woman with strava has ever ridden. I must keep this location very secret to protect my title!
There are roughly 180 women with strava who ride in my local area, and I am pretty regularly in the bottom 3 on any segment that I choose to look at it. I am not downhearted by this, I just see that there is plenty of scope to achieve significant gains!
I have also discovered a new app called Myfitness pal. What an eye opener this is. I have said that I want to lose 1/2lb per week so I am given a 1500 calorie allowance. Any exercise I do increases the calorie allowance, and any food I eat is deducted from it. At the end of the day I am over or under my allowance and the app tells me what I am likely to weigh in 5 weeks if I continue eating as I have that day. There are some days when I don't like the app very much! However, it is certainly influencing my food choices.
On Sunday morning instead of heading out with the Verulam crowd, I joined the Verulam ladies training session. We did some cycling exercises in a school playground (flashbacks to cycling proficiency lessons) and then did a very brief ride to a coffee shop in Wheathamstead.
There was a very fine piece of chocolate fudge cake with my name on it in the coffee shop. However, a quick check of my strava app and myfitness pal app and I calculated that the cake, which was around 700 calories (who knew they were this much!) would have been more calories than I was burning up on the brief ride.
Here is a picture of the unrequited chocolate cake.
Instead I settled for a 300 calorie teacake. Which was still in fact quite a surprising amount of calories.
I was quite disappointed with the number of kilometres that I did today (16.5km), although the training will undoubtedly come in handy, especially the bonus puncture repair training
When I met up with Stuart again I checked his Strava stats. 76.5km ridden and given the speed he was cycling at, 2,100 calories burned. I was so jealous, I could have eaten the whole damn cake!
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