Clarity

I have still been going out on Jackdaw an average of two times per week since the Big Dark started. Not as often as I would like to. I've sorted out the light problem, although I would like more; I've not been offroad in the dark again as the one time I did, it was extremely muddy and the light was being eaten by the lack of reflective material on the track. It was scary. I needed to go quite slowly and got spooked by figures moving in the trees that I didn't think should be there (if you know what I mean). I would really have liked to pile on the speed but didn't want to end up face-planting into the ground or a tree, so had to brazen it out with confident body-language and poker-face. It seemed to work.

Then the route that I had chosen with good surface, a fun mixture of street-lighting and Absolute Black, a logical turning point and rest-and-drink place turned out to be depressingly short in distance. It seemed remarkably hard work for such a short distance though. Wierd.

My average speed has also dropped to an obscenely low level - it's getting embarrassing to even look at come the end of the ride.

After having entered all this bad news into my spreadsheet a few times, reason kicked in and informed me that it's impossible that it can be two miles to the village centre and back but only be one mile more to go considerably further. I drove the route on the way to work. The computer is recording less than 50% of the total trip distance.

Cycle computer was checked for correct rolling distance; it was recording 95% of the distance travelled - not enough to explain the 50% drop). Magnet and sensor position relative to each other checked - fine. Clean - yep. Distance from transmitter to computer mount measured - well within the maximum distance. Checked again and again and again as I was convinced it must be one of these things causing the problem.

Went to cycle computer manufacturer's website and looked at online manuals and tech support. Minimum operating temperature? O°C. Ahhhhhh!!! We have a culprit. The car has been recording between 3°C and 4°C on the way home for weeks now and after sunset it's bound to be a lot lower. With the windchill of me going between 8 and 18mph, faster if I go for some hills, the temperature will be considerably less! Especially when the temperature does not even get into positive figures all day, unless in direct sunlight.

So the truth of it is that my average speed, rather than being gobsmackingly low, has actually been increasing nicely, and my trip distances have been coming along nicely too. All I have to do is to make a note of my departure time and time arriving back home, right? I know the mileage of my route and can therefore work out average speed.

There is a teeny tiny problem remaining however.

I like to poke around and lurk when on my bike. I like the feeling of being able to explore this lane or this track or see what’s around this corner just because I feel like it at the time. I especially like to stop, turn off all lights, stand in the lee of a tree and just take things in for a while sometimes. Thursday night was a classic example – the moonlight was simply blaring down onto fields white with frost, with bare tree silhouettes on the crest of the hill, and that kind of deep quiet that you usually only get when it's snowing.

I can’t really see me dutifully recording these starts and stops in a little notebook so as not to mess up my average speed. I think I should take this as a reminder that there is, and always was, much more to cycling than numbers and performance increase (however slow). If that were all there was to it, I may as well be in a gym or in my bedroom on the stepper. I wonder how everyone else copes when the stats are not available any more.