My legs ache but it's in a good cause.

I can't really wait for the weather to warm up. It's nearly spring and with that month I get a little bit of an itch to exercise. If I scratch that itch straight away my sometimes slightly obsessive nature will latch on to it and enable a little bit of success.

A few years ago this is exactly what happened. I started running and within a few months I was running at least four times a week and at least 5km each run, working up to 10 miles. But then the dark, cold weather came and with a few weeks of snowy, icy weather my fitness waned and so did my resolve.

Then, being the middle age codger that I am, every time I attempted to restart I found niggles here and there and my excuses were rife.

http://www.st-michaels-ce45.lancsngfl.ac.uk/images/library/300px-Cycling_(road)_pictogram.svg

Well, this weekend I decided on some new exercise. My bike is serviced and running nicely. All twenty four gears engage and disengage perfectly, the tyres are inflated to 60psi and in the spirit of boosting motivation I have purchased a new (cheap) app for my phone which measures distance, elevation and speed.

Outside I have a quiet road that loops round in what is almost exactly four hundred metres and is therefore the perfect training ground to build up my stamina and fitness before embarking on a greater challenge.

I did about 30 minutes of cycling today not too strenuous but I can feel it in my legs. That's good. My leg muscles are pretty rubbish and need rebuilding. This is where it starts. Now if I can just do half an hour at least four times a week I might start to get fit again.

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