So, how to best start an introductory post?…
Hi, I’m Nik and welcome to NikDotBike, a website that I’ve put together to track my progress in trying to get fitter and to explore the country a bit by bike.
I’ve put the basics in the about me page, but essentially, I’m in my mid-thirties, never particularly healthy and have been getting bigger year on year. I’ve had moments of trying to improve my fitness - I’ve been stopping and starting with running and do manage to go out at least once a week. I’ve tried to do all the tracking calories and what not - but find it very difficult to do so! Plus I’m just really lazy, the weather in the UK is stereotypically wet at the moment and I really don’t want to go outside, and gyms are at least a 30 minute drive away - being of the not very motivated type - it’s stacked up against me!
So what’s different this time? To be honest not too much - just introspection, inspiration from a family member and dropping some money.
My mother recently got one of them NordicTrack bikes and was singing its praises; I don’t have the desire to spend that amount of money on a machine and I have an old bike gathering dust hidden in the back of the house - so I got some stuff together to be able to use Zwift, shuffled my office around a bit, and now I’m on board with changing my fitness for the better (theoretically?!).
With that I have a means, and now a goal - what do I want to do? Firstly it’s to lose weight, what figure to choose? Well popping my weight and height into a BMI calculator and rounding to a nice figure gives me 80kg - I feel like this is a bit too much, I’m quite broad but we’ll see 🤷.
Next is fitness, thankfully there’s a lot of different metrics that come with cycling so it’s as simple as tracking those right? My current Zwift setup gathers Heart Rate, Watts, Cadence (well soon as my cadence sensor comes), and some kind of Speed, Distance, and Elevation based on its virtual world. The FTP or Functional Threshold Power, is a average amount of power that a cyclist can sustain for an hour - and it seems to be the metric that is used in Zwift so let’s just picked that. I’ve done an FTP test in Zwift, had a look around, decided to add about 50% on top of my current measurement, round it, and get 250W at the end of it.
Finally I want to git good at cycling. I live in Somerset, a lovely rural area with some great cycling routes, bordering on Dartmoor, Exmoor, and pretty close to Wales - all beautiful areas that’s ripe for cycling around. I’m thinking, not this year but next, that I’d like to be in a position to do some bike-packing treks - I’ve seen some local-ish people who does trips to get a feel for it before deciding to head off for a lonesome trip.
So here we have it, that’s me and what I want to do. The plan is to keep my goals and progress up to date, to post bits and pieces about this journey, and I’ve also set up a video channel for bits and pieces in the near future. I’ve got links to my Strava, Zwift and Video channel below, as well as my Ko-Fi page if you’re wanting to support me and donate - all proceeds going to things to help me be a fitter person and a better cyclist.
Anyway, thanks for popping in - if you want to follow my progress, you can grab my feed here and I’m planning on setting up a Mastodon or Bluesky account shortly to stalk me.
Till next time!
