MONDAY 7th April - 13 weeks to go

Miles last week : 140 (120 road, 20 indoor)
Weight : 14st 13.6lbs (-0.8 lbs)
Body fat : 27.4% (+0.4%)
Tantia body type 2 (obese)

Ah, that's more like it, at least from the cycling point of view. Friday was the first really sunny day we had and I even left my vest off for the ride. Headed out intending to do 25 miles but weather so good I just kept going and managed to do just under 50 miles. However, need to revisit my refueling strategy, one bannana clearly not enough as after 30 miles just got very tired. Luckly, I was just passing through Bighton, a village I used to live in 20 years ago, which has a great little country pub. Grabbing my £10 emergency money from my tool bag I popped in... you can't buy much with £10 these days - a sandwich and two pints.

Completely empty pub, so I sat outside in the sunshine for a rest. Replenished, I set off for the final 20 miles home, unfortunately, the two pints seemed to have cancelled out any benefit the sandwich may have had and they were a painful and slow 20 miles. Next time I will bring more food with me.

Saturday a rest day so off to Reading to watch London Irish beat Perpingnan in the Heineken Cup, next stop Twickenham for the semi final. You never know, it could be LI v Munster in the final, now that would be a game worth seeing. Very good lunch beforehand at the Crooked Billet, a pub that my father-in-law used to drink in fifty years ago and that he took me to a few times 20 years ago. Then it was a little two room country pub with beer served straight from the barrel by an overweight widower. Now its a pretty fancy gastro pub made famous by the fact that Kate Windslet had her (first) wedding reception there. Having said that, the food was very good and I shall be re-visiting.

Paul and I cycled from Reading to Oxford last year and stopped in here for a pint. A lovely ride of about 50 miles with the benefit of having an Oxford pub crawl as the reward at the end. Probably worth us having another go at that ride in our preparation.

How not to sell a bike

Now it would be foolish not to go out and buy a new bicycle, so armed with a big bag of cash I popped into a pretty big bike shop fairly near by. It stocked the three bikes on my short list - Cervelo Soloist Carbon, Colnago C50 and the new Trek Madone. Why those three, I hear you ask - well simply I like the look of them from pictures in bike mags, no technical information to back that up at all. So was hoping for some good sound advice about how to choose between them.

The salesman (I use the term loosley), started off by rubbishing the Colnago. Basically, it was all about style and vastly overpriced for what you get - as was Campag - much better to go with Shimano. The Italians, apparently, put more by style than actual performance. When I asked him the difference between the Cervelo Soloist and R3 he made no sense at all. But then, best of all - I told him I wanted a triple chainset not a compact. At this point he said in that case I should go for the R3 as a triple would look stupid on the Soloist!! And all from a man who a moment before had said that style should not win out over substance. Needless to say I will be taking my bag of cash elsewhere.