What a wonderful day it was today. I set out with the good intention of doing four training laps (54 miles or 87km – I’m going to start quoting km as it sounds further) and did it fairly easily – even I do say so myself. The only real problem was the sit bones, which were pretty painful and put me off trying for a record fifth lap. The roads were fairly quiet, which I put down to the weather – it was very misty with a damp chill in the air. Not the sort of day you want to take the kids out anywhere. Which is fine by me 
. Mind you, I only saw one other bike rider, which is quite unusual – that’s ignoring the families out on the cycle lane along the seafront.
I thought I might have to abandon on the third lap though, as I was having problems with my left hand (or is that foot) pedal when it suddenly froze, nearly taking my foot off with it and me off of my bike. About 7 miles into the training loop, I had little choice but to keep going. I was, though, starting to feel very disappointed at what seemed to be an inevitable early shower and kissing the fourth lap goodbye. Next, the pedal started making a periodic crunching and squealing noise of metal against metal. Finally, the crunching and squealing stopped altogether, and the pedal started working fine again. I can only imagine what the bearings must be like, so I will give it a service before I go out again.
As a brief aside, I came across this bizarre video produced in 1963 about bike safety. It actually starts to get pretty creepy, and goodness knows why the producers gave the kids the faces they did – sort of demented monkeys that wouldn’t look out of place in The Wizard of Oz. You can find it here: http://www.fazed.org/video/view/?id=229
