April 2020 cycling challenge
Towards the end of March, my uncle sent our triathlon group a challenge he was thinking of doing; dubbed the "1000 challenge". There weren't any specifics and I assumed he was talking about 1000km of cycling. I called him later that day to ask him about it and he clarified he meant 1000 pushups/situps/leg raises/dips and squats in a week. We laughed about my misunderstanding and then realised 1000km of cycling would actually be a good challenge. The call ended by us agreeing to do it; starting April 1st.
The only problem was the Coronavirus lockdown in the UK. Whilst we could still go outside for exercise, the spirit of the lockdown was hardly to encourage cycling far away from home. Similarly, we couldn't meet up because we all live in separate households. In the end, we all agreed to do the challenge on our indoor turbo trainers.
The distance in itself is not particularly difficult, but the constant commitment was the challenge here. At a reasonable pace on my turbo trainer, it'd still require ~31hrs of cycling throughout the month, so roughly an hour per day with no rest.
My plan was to try and bank some extra distance at the start, with the option for rest days later in the month. I set my Garmin Connect up with the 1000km challenge, and 4x 250km weeks. If I met the weekly target, I'd finish 2 days early.
The challenge started off well. I got 114km in on the Saturday, which was ~3.5x my daily target so I could take extra rest days if needed.
Week 2 got harder as I was finding it difficult to sit on the saddle for so long. I figured it was down to my bike position so I adjusted it and things got better. I watched 3 episodes of Tiger King on that Sunday morning.
Week 3 was good because I was past the halfway point and ahead of target.
I had a bit of a knee issue in Week 4 but it went away in 2 days so I didn't worry about it too much. The 1000km ended 2 days early with a group ride to finish it off. We all had some sort of alcoholic beverage ready for afterwards, and we did a mini presentation of some fictitious awards for everyone.
Because I was often busy throughout the day, I'd find myself cycling at 11pm at night a lot. I'd pass the time by calling family to chat, or video call with my uncle.
I ended up doing 1024.74km over 30:59:54hrs, burning 19,245 calories.
