Nick Rowley (1981) Colchester Essex (England)
At 39 years old I have decided to start trying. To take my cycling seriously.
I started cycling in December 2015 just to try and get fit and see if my love of watching cycling transferred in to a love of riding a bike.
I joined a local cycling club in 2016 even though I didn’t ride with them that often.
In 2017 I started cycling more but was still quite a lazy cyclist, meaning I didn’t really try as hard as I could and still lived quite an unhealthy lifestyle, smoking eating junk etc. It got to the point where when I did my first 100 mile ride I didn’t overly feel like i had gone particularly hard and knew I had more inside of me.
I contained on this path for a couple of years setting myself distance goals yearly but with no real speed or effort involved.
Come February 2019 I decided to upgrade my gear to the bike I always wanted a Giant Propel Advanced. I notice that with the bike I always wanted I found I pushed myself a bit more and started trying to hit better speed and finally my heart rate felt like I was trying a little bit more.
In the July of 2019 I decided to enter an out and date time trial on my local course to see what I could finally do and promised myself that I would try and hard as I could. I set myself the goal of tying to finish in under 30 minutes for the out and back 10 miles.
I finished with a time of 28:42 and a speed of 20.9mph so I hit my goal.
This time trial start a new love for cycling and made me determined to see if I trained properly what was possible for me.
Forward to 2020 and I started the year on zwift doing a tiny bit of racing to try and stay fit and mainly to test myself against over people.
I had got myself into pretty good shape and had planned to race the time trial season in Colchester and had started to invest in myself a tiny bit. I had kitted out the Propel with TT bars had got a proper fit and invested in some aero kit as well as a TT helmet, and then COVID hit and I threw my toys out the pram and basically gave up cycling for a period of 6 months only commuting to work.
At the end of October 2020 some friends of mine made me realise that I needed to jump back on the bike. Working for the NHS through COVID was killing me mentally and I needed a release. My friends got me back on zwift and doing the weekly WTL time trails on there as part of Colchester Rovers. We were making steady progress each week and improving and it finally brought back my love of riding my bike.
Come 2021 I started a training plan to see what would happen if I followed it properly and stuck to my guns and didn’t quit.
With finding my love of cycling again I have set myself some serious goals for the year, some of which I have already hit and some of these are still in the planning process.
@rowleyscyclingproject
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