The Wattbike I bought three years ago has seen plenty of action in its time in my utility room – it just hasn't always been used as its creators intended.
Over-engineered drying rack, toddler’s climbing frame, monument to days of 5w/kg past… only sporadically have I used it as you'd expect: as a smart bike for indoor training. And with serious time on the bike in the outside world limited by one thing or another in recent years, I’ve been out of shape for longer than I’d like.
So, the vague notion of ‘getting fit again’ has been a recurring thought for some time. It’s particularly intense in January, for obvious reasons. Like many of you, I emerge on New Year’s Day well fed and watered from a solid month of Christmas dinners and parties.
This movement of the calendar brings an arbitrary expectation – from both internal and external sources – to turn things around. Online, a switch is flicked, and recipes for indulgent Christmas dishes and craft beer wish lists are replaced with ideas for how to burn it all off again. It’s a whiplash-inducing U-turn; an overload of ideas that heaps unreasonable pressure on us to achieve.
So, how have I fared on the cycling resolutions front recently? Looking at my stats on Zwift, I managed a grand total of five Zwift sessions in the five Januarys to 2024. That adds up to three hours, which in the context of almost 12 full days of recorded activities on Zwift through that entire five-year period, is pitiful.
I’ve either succumbed to resolution pressure or simply not taken the bait. January clearly isn’t my month and I’m not the only one: 80 per cent of resolutions are believed to fail within those first 31 days.
For folk in the UK like me, January is an unrealistic month to make drastic overhauls to our cycling habits. Have you seen it outside recently? When it’s not blowing a gale and lashing it down, there’s fog so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Our vitamin D, which we get from sunlight and is important for immunity, is through the floor. The long nights do nothing for our mood and motivation suffers. Need I go on? It’s also well into the off-season, for this roadie anyway.
It's cycling-adjacent, but one of the most successful New Year’s resolutions of recent times has been Dry January – alcohol abstinence through the month. It was started, in a formal sense, in 2013 by Emily Robinson and has risen from 4,000 people taking part that year to 175,000 a decade later. They are the official figures – I’ve done it numerous times without signing up, so there must be many more.
The problem for me was that abstinence was always limited to the neat confines of January and I’d start drinking again in February, even if the first day of the month fell on a Monday. Instead, in 2024, I drank alcohol in January and chose a random day in February to begin a break from boozing.
The result was I didn’t have another unit until my summer holiday in August and haven’t really wanted to drink since. It happened quietly. There was nobody to remind me or hold me to a bold January resolution, so the pressure was off. And as someone who is naturally sceptical of a bandwagon, choosing my own date to make that change really worked.
So, for 2025, I thought I’d apply the same methodology to ‘getting fit again’. A random day in February would have been too late to get in reasonable shape for the 2025 season, so instead I chose a date last November. I quietly got back on the bike and two months later have successfully built a turbo session into my nightly routine.
For ages, I’d been saying I don’t have the time. Well, it turns out I do. This momentum even got me out on the road at Christmas, in that fog. It was brilliant.
Like all lifestyle changes that you hope become permanent, I’ve got goals, both long and short – events and races to aim for and training plans and sessions to work on in the meantime.
This is the year I get my fitness back, but please don’t call it a New Year’s resolution – 2024 deserves some of the credit.
