Bicycle navigation

The picture below (apologies for the craptastic image editing but if you click on it I think you can see it better) shows my morning commute (in red) and my evening commute (in blue) from yesterday.

It also clearly (well, if you can actually see the image properly) shows the differentce between a just-about-one-hour commute that makes bicycling faster than taking the Underground, and a 1 hour 20 minute commute that makes it much slower, and also more dangerous as I find myself in central London swerving around bendy busses and pedicabs in the prime pre-theatre hour.

This happens to me all the time. Somewhere around Parliament Square I can't seem to go the good way in the evening. I'm learning lots about central London, though.

15.2 miles, 1:22:23.

I intended to get up this morning to run 4 miles. I very carefully set my alarm to the proper time, allowing 10 minutes of snoozing. And then I went to sleep. Notice that no where in here did I TURN MY ALARM ON. Meg's alarm went off around the time I should have been getting home. Oops. Hoping to get home in time to make it up to myself tonight.

Cycling Commute #1: in which I feel awesome

After the weekend's drunken inaguration of Little Betty, this morning I decided to use her for more healthful pursuits and cycle to work. A bit of a late start and not the most efficient route left me getting to work at pushing 10am (oops) but I felt amazing. First of all, I had to ride right through the City at morning rush hour and I honestly haven't done a lot of city riding in my life so I'm not that comfortable with cars all around me. But I found several other bikers to follow and did not get hit, even by the guy driving the long flat open truck with wooden poles on it who acted like he was in a Mini. A few minor errors in navigation but I managed to not cross Putney Bridge. 13 miles and 1:20 later and I'm a rock star.

That's not really the point, now, is it?

I beat back Morning Brain this morning, who reared her ugly head at 5:45 with thoughts of going back to sleep and putting off the run until tomorrow afternoon. Rational me was awake enough to say, "remember how great you felt on Tuesday when you ran before work? Get up." and I only hit snooze twice (8 minutes total - I have a short snoozer) and was out of bed before 6. Yay me.

Took the first 2 miles nice and easy, as prescribed by the schedule: 12:09 and 12:36. Next three were scheduled to be at 11:06 pace. I ran each of them faster than that (10:25, 10:43, 10:38) but I stopped to catch my breath at the mile markers, kind of missing the objective of key run #2 - to run fast when tired. Duh. Then a nice slow jog with some walking mixed in for mile 6 (13:45) and I'm home just in time to catch Meg before she gets in the shower and leaves my key-losing self locked out on the doorstep for the second time in 2 days.


6 miles, 1:10:55 (11:50 pace)