At the beginning of this journey I had very little experience and very little available in terms of tools, so I started off with what I had available and what I had experience with.

I had a mountain bike that my brother gave me as a gift, a cycle computer that I purchased and a borrowed scale and of course my computer with Excel on.

With the diet that my brother and I discussed and agreed on and the bicycle, I started my first bike ride in approximately thirty years, with my son as a companion. My first trip was a mere 7,9 kilometers and I didn’t record it as I didn’t think of doing it. Only at around the third ride did I get around to start recording. The attached graph shows my progress in terms of performance and weight loss in the first month, starting with my first recording on 26 February 2016.

After that I switched to the Tomtom Mysport app which worked with a TomTom Spark 3 sports watch with heart rate monitor. During the first month I felt that I may have pushed myself too hard as I had no idea how to measure myself to see that I didn’t harm myself, especially my heart. So I looked at many options and at the time I felt that the Tomtom wrist based sport watch with heart rate monitor made the most sense as I didn’t want to wear a heart rate chest strap. In retrospect I would have gone another direction but the device fulfilled its purpose very well until I decided to migrate to a cycle computer with GPS, and separate chest heart rate monitor. At a later stage I will discuss what prompted the change but in essence I felt that a wrist based computer did not give me enough information unless I switched screens and for that I had to remove my hands from the handlebars which posed a safety risk due to the rough terrain that we traverse with our mountain bikes.

Those first rides were very hard, and I remember coming up the last hill to my house blowing hard, having to hyper-ventilate to get enough oxygen into my lungs. Very soon though my performance started improving tremendously.

By the end of the first month I did rides in excess of 14 kilometers and my average speed increased from 14,6 to 18,1.

During the first month I also fell in a mud pool and injured myself slightly and had a flat tyre which fortunately happened 100 meters from my gate.

The day when I fell in the mud was also the first day that I realised that the pain that was a constant companion for many years were starting to go away. As I got out of bed that morning, I realised that I am experiencing a process of healing. When I fell a little bit later I was so overwhelmed by the improvement in my health that I didn’t even consider stopping and decided that I will ride through the pain if I had to. Fortunately the pain was not too bad but I have to admit that it sometimes had me wondering if I didn’t experience chest pains and that is what led to me purchasing the Tomtom with heart rate monitor. A decision that I don’t regret and assisted me greatly in improving my exercise efficiency especially as Tomtom provides a lot of very helpful tools and information to assist in getting fitter, stronger and faster.

By the end of the first month my son and a neighbour were my constant training companions and we were riding almost every day.

Just as a matter of interest, by the end of 2017 I completed more than 3600 kilometers, considering when I started and how short my first rides were, a remarkable feat.