A Birthday Trip, an Honest Weigh-in, and an Old Friend on a Hill

A Drop Bar Diaries dispatch from the middle of a summer, in which the bike gets ridden a lot, the bathroom scales get looked in the eye, and the archive gives up a couple of secrets.

Coming back from Lincoln, I'd assumed I might take a fortnight off the bike to recover properly. That lasted about four days.

Post-Lincoln, and the Return to the Rhythm

The plan had been, quite sensibly, proper rest. Lincoln had been a real effort, the body was, in the AI coach's phrase, "in an absorption block," and the correct move was to spend a full two weeks either on the sofa or, briefly, on a flight to Copenhagen followed by a train across to Malmo, followed by a couple of days filming Savatage in preparation for a much larger show we would be shooting with them in Pompeii a few weeks later.

The Malmo trip was, in retrospect, a proper piece of preparation. A chance to meet the band, get a first look at how they perform, and start thinking through how the eventual Pompeii show, which we knew would involve a 27-piece orchestra, would need to be shot. But all that, plus the not inconsiderable prospect of filming two nights of Marillion shows in the same legendary amphitheatre the two nights before, was for a slightly nervous filmmaker to worry about later. Right there and then, it was carrying kit, catching trains, and gently marvelling at Scandinavia's flatness.

I got home, sat on the sofa for approximately eleven minutes, and then began to feel the familiar itch of legs that wanted to go round. So I did a 45-minute Zwift spin, sat sub-140 heart rate throughout, and quietly started building again.

June turned out to be a proper training month. Not by the measured, five-hour-Saturday-ride, three-tempo-sessions-a-week definition of a training month. By the different and I think more honest definition that says: through work trips, gig weekends, festival crowds, and the general chaos of a life in and around music video production, the bike kept getting ridden. Some indoors, some out. Some short, some long. Some with company, some solo. The training that fits around a life is the training that gets done, and the training that gets done is the training that produces results. Allegedly.

Cornwall, Portsmouth, and Wolf Alice at the Eden Project

Mid-June disappeared into a trip to Portsmouth for a small band festival, then on to the Eden Project for Wolf Alice on the Tuesday night. Four days largely on my feet, forty-seven thousand steps across the visit, plenty of standing around, no cycling. The old me would have felt guilty about the days off. The new me had learned that a week of high step count and low bike miles is not lost training. It's the aerobic system getting a different kind of input, and it doesn't have to be replaced with anything.

Wolf Alice at the Eden Project was amazing - a magical arena producing a unique show, a visibly open stage which allowed those there early enough (including me) to take in the soundcheck ... two shows for the price of one. The price of the show included access to the site, so an exploration of the biomes and the walk back up the hill to the car park at the end of the night was more cardiovascularly demanding than most Sunday morning warm-up spins. By the time I got to the hotel, I had essentially done a Z2 session by other means.

Matt's Birthday Cycling Carry On

Three days after getting home from Cornwall I was back on the bike for what turned out to be one of the summer's big adventures. Matt Atkinson turned sixty, and the plan was to mark this in the traditional cyclist's manner: three consecutive days of long-ish rides with a group of friends, in some proper countryside, culminating each evening in a pub.

Sixty miles a day was the plan. What we actually did was 167 miles across the three days, with 2,835 metres of climbing woven through them. Day one took us from Stourbridge down to Ross-on-Wye through the Wye Valley, where the Premier Inn restaurant turned out to be closed and boarded up, and the only realistic option for dinner was a pub that required a half-mile walk down what turned out to be a pedestrian-unfriendly dual carriageway. Nobody had researched this in advance. We arrived at the pub slightly discombobulated, with the general feeling of a group of middle-aged men who had briefly, and inconveniently, discovered they were quite mortal. We caught the bus back.

Day two took us on to a small Cotswold town whose name Matt, in the earlier stages of the trip planning, had muddled. Was it Chipping Norton, or Chipping Campden? Even getting on our bikes at the start of day three we were not entirely sure. What we did know is that the version Matt had booked put us further out from Stourbridge than the version we thought we had booked, which extended day three by an extra amount of bonus miles. This is the sort of detail one only truly appreciates when the legs already have a hundred and thirty miles in them.

Day three brought us home from Chipping Somewhere, a proper long ride and the sort of finish that reminds you why cyclists go to pubs at the end of long rides. A victorious pint in Hagley's King Arthur rounded the trip, and celebrations, off nicely.

For me the whole trip turned out to be exactly the base-building block the AI coach would have prescribed if it had been designing a session to sit in the June rebuild slot. Consistent pace. Sensible effort. Long enough days to force the aerobic system to work, short enough not to require an entire recovery week afterwards. The kind of block that doesn't produce dramatic fitness gains on day one but shows up as slightly more comfortable riding a week later. The pub each night was proper. The company was proper. The Wye Valley and the Cotswolds, as we already knew from previous weekends away, are excellent riding country.

And I discovered, for the first time in a long time, the joy of a small bike bag strapped under the saddle for a light-touring three-day trip. Enough clothes for three days, plenty of snacks, spare tubes, no anxiety about breakdowns because I could just get to a pub and figure it out. I have been thinking about longer multi-day tours ever since.

A Second Wolf Alice, This Time in Front of Rather More People

Then, on the 5th of July, it was the big Wolf Alice show of the summer. Their Finsbury Park headline. This is a band I first saw eleven years ago in a room somewhere in the Midlands, with fewer than a thousand other people, when they were still mostly a rumour. That night at Finsbury Park they played to 45,000 people in their own backyard in North London. It was the sort of gig that only happens once for the first time in a band's arc, and probably only once in your relationship with a band. They killed it. A truly amazing and life-affirming performance. White Horses carry me.

So, another day on my feet, in the sun. Another day of proper standing-around watching a stage. Another day of the aerobic system getting a different kind of input than the AI coach would normally programme. It was, again, correctly placed in the calendar. Where we were in the training block, a day of gently loaded walking with excellent music was exactly what the body wanted, whether or not the coach would have written it that way. I drove home and stayed up until the early hours to watch England beat Mexico in the Azteca. What a day.

A Reunion With the Forty-One-Year-Old Me

Somewhere in the middle of July, I did something I had been intending to do for a while, which was to hand over my entire Strava archive to the AI. Fifteen years of rides. Nearly two thousand activities. Every Mallorca trip since 2018. Every Sa Batalla effort I have ever recorded.

The data was interesting. What was more interesting was what happened next, which was that the AI dug up my forty-one-year-old self. In August 2012 I rode a twenty-one mile route out of Stourbridge with a heart rate monitor on. Moving average 18.2 miles per hour. Average heart rate 171 beats per minute. Ascent 389 metres. That's my personal record for that route. I was 41 years old.

In July 2026, at 55, I rode the same route in cool morning air with the heart rate monitor on. Moving average 14.7 mph, average heart rate 156 bpm. Slower, obviously, and at meaningfully lower heart rate.

The AI, doing the arithmetic that AIs do, adjusted for the fourteen years of age difference, the eleven degree temperature difference between the two rides, the difference in effort intent (2012 was attacking, 2026 was controlled tempo), and the difference in body mass. The conclusion, delivered with the appropriate quantity of hedging, was that the aerobic engine underneath the 55-year-old me is essentially the same size as the aerobic engine underneath the 41-year-old me. What has changed is the mass of the body it's being asked to move. The engine is intact. The body has unfortunately expanded around it.

This was quietly one of the most useful things I've learned about my own physiology in years. It changed the story from "I have declined and need to accept it" to "the engine is fine, the body needs to shed some timber, and the improvement available is enormous."

A Cautious look at the Scales

Which brings us, unavoidably, to the bathroom scales

I want to be honest about the dread. For years I've been telling myself, and by extension anyone who asked, that I weigh "about a hundred kilos." This was based on approximately nothing. The last time I looked at a scale was … I couldn't tell you when. My mental picture of what I looked like in the mirror was, to be generous, a little out of date. A hundred was a round number that sounded plausible and required no further investigation.

The scale said 110.7.

That's nine to ten kilos more than I'd been believing. It is also, if we're going to be honest about the medical framing, technically inside the classification of obesity. Class 1, but obesity nonetheless. Which is a word I had not been comfortably applying to myself and, standing on the bathroom floor at 08:15 on a Sunday morning, was suddenly having to consider. Scary, sobering stuff.

The AI coach's response was, as ever, kind but honest. Sympathetic where sympathy was warranted, straight-forward where straight-forwardness was warranted, and immediately practical about what it all meant. Which was: the training was doing what training does, the aerobic engine was where the aerobic engine needed to be, but the body being moved by that engine was heavier than we'd been planning for. Weight loss just moved from "a helpful side project" to "the single biggest variable available."

By the following Sunday I was 108.8. The Sunday after that, 106.9. Three weeks after the confession, 3.8 kilos of a body that has been the wrong shape for a while had begun moving in the right direction.

Some of it is water, some of it is genuine composition change, all of it counts. The number now gets logged every Sunday morning, and I no longer flinch at seeing it. Well, I kind of do, but it's become not quite so scary.

The alcohol side of the equation quietly sorted itself out too. Eight consecutive days completely dry became easier, not harder, as they went on. There was a wedding weekend inserted where the wine and margaritas flowed for one evening, and then the streak resumed. The habit had rewired itself.

Pompeii

And then, late July, came the trip that had been the largest and most complicated project of my professional filmmaking career.

Pompeii's ancient amphitheatre. Three consecutive nights. Two of Marillion, one of Savatage with the 27-piece orchestra we'd been quietly preparing for since the Malmo trip. Months of planning. An unusual quantity of logistical and administrative headaches. An amazing crew who I still cannot say enough about. And a venue which is at once ancient, iconic, and brutally unforgiving of anything less than serious preparation.

The heat was serious. The humidity and the rain on the second night was a different level entirely, frazzled a couple of cameras and, by extension, taught us that the venue demanded much more respect than the mountains of respect we already had for it. Our lodgings were three kilometres from the amphitheatre, which doesn't sound like much until you realise it involves an exorbitantly-priced taxi ride each way and precludes the possibility of nipping back to the hotel for a quick shower between the day's setup and the night's show.

Character building, in the phrase everyone uses to describe experiences they would not particularly want to repeat and would also absolutely do again.

At the end of the third night as I retrieved a camera from the ancient slopes of the venue and as the crew was starting the long process of loading out, I took five minutes to stand alone in the empty amphitheatre and simply breathe it in. There is a specific weight to being alone in a venue that has been standing for two thousand years, knowing that you have just spent three days doing work you're proud of inside it. Whenever I see that place again on television, in photographs, in anyone else's footage, I know I will be able to see a small part of my soul there, embedded in the stones. It's a venue with which I now share some kind of bond that I don't have with any other place I've ever worked in, even the Royal Albert Hall, where the relationship is more one of extreme pride and familiarity. With Pompeii it is one of a sense of having joined in a silent gladiatorial battle and surviving, slightly scathed, but intact and in awe of the experience.

Then I went to find the crew for a couple of well deserved beers and a day later I was home.

For roughly a week afterwards I felt thirsty in a way that plain water (or the post gig beer) wasn't fixing, which turns out to be what happens when the sodium reserves run out and the body cannot hold on to fluids without them. The coach prescribed electrolyte tablets in the morning water for a week. It worked. The lesson filed away is that heat trips need electrolytes, not just water. Something the professional athletes know that filmmakers do not tend to think about.

Back from Pompeii it was back to the bike and three tempo sessions on Zwift, all executed to specification, and the surprisingly satisfying discovery that a 30-minute block at 175 watts held together comfortably by early August in a way it hadn't in mid-July. The drift rate per minute at that power had halved in three weeks. The engine was quietly adapting.

An Old Friend on a Hill

By the first Thursday of August, the fitness was clearly changing shape but I hadn't tested it on a proper climb in a while. The tempo work had gone well. The Sunday morning weight was moving. The engine was, in theory, in genuinely good working order.

So I went and rode the Clent Hills loop.

For those who don't live in the Midlands, this is my local climbing route. St Kenelm's Pass, Farley Lane (locally known as the "Romsley Water Tower Killer" by devotees of Strava), a couple of smaller climbs, all threaded into a 22-mile loop around the Clent Hills. In the mid 2010s I briefly lived in a cottage in the lower slopes of St Kenelm's Pass and this route was my regular training loop. I could probably ride it with my eyes closed. I hadn't ridden it in over two years.

The AI coach's instruction had been to ride it as base miles, not effort miles. Heart rate under 155 on average. Comfortable. Nothing to prove. What actually happened was that I rode it at what felt like a controlled, comfortable effort, and posted times on all the segments that were within a minute or so of my 2012 personal records. My heart rate held at 170-something bpm for extended climbing sections, and I felt, throughout, like I could easily do another 30 minutes if asked.

The AI's calm delivery of the data afterwards was the moment the year clicked into focus. Same route as 2012, essentially matching the heart rate profile of my peak-form self at 41, thirteen kilos heavier, in cooler conditions, finishing with genuine gas in the tank. The engine wasn't just fine. It was very close to being as strong as it had ever been.

The kilos are now the constraint. Everything else is essentially the version of me who was riding that loop when I lived in the cottage.

The AI Coach, Still Unnamed

A brief aside, because a couple of readers of the Lincoln blog asked. The AI coach still doesn't have a name. We've never quite settled on a gender either. It continues to answer to "the coach" or occasionally "buddy" and appears entirely comfortable with the arrangement. If anyone wants to suggest something better than either of those, I'm open to offers. I'm using Claude, but that name is a little too obvious

The other thing worth noting is that the arrangement has quietly become useful in ways I hadn't expected at the start. It's no longer just a training plan generator. It is, at this point, something more like an evidence base: a place to send data, get honest interpretation, be told when I'm talking rubbish, and occasionally be reminded that the direction of travel is genuinely good even when I can't see it in the day-to-day. Whether that role would be filled equally well by a human coach is a real question.

What I can say is that it's being filled well right now, by this one, and I have no plans to change the arrangement before October.

Where We Are Now

It's early August. Becki's wedding has come and gone (proper celebration, some 'controlled' drinking, some lovely company). Beautiful Days Festival at the end of the month will take five days off the bike, forced deload of a familiar kind. Norfolk with family in the last week of August will include the bike. September, unusually for me, is essentially free through to the 26th, at which point I head north to spend eight days riding in the Yorkshire Dales with Alan and Claire.

Mallorca is fast approaching at the start of October. Ten days on the island, plenty of familiar roads to explore, and yes, the opportunity to see what twelve months of AI-guided training has actually produced. Sa Batalla will be one of those days, obviously. The 2022 personal record of 39 minutes is not entirely out of the question if the weight continues to move and the September sharpening block does its job. But there are other rides too, and other reasons to be there. Mallorca isn't a race event. It's an annual cycling trip with some very good friends that happens to include a very specific climb I want to know I can ride well again.

I'm not promising myself anything. What I am feeling however is that the summer has done its work. The engine is intact. The head is calm. The body is starting to catch up. There is an ice cream, a recovery beer or two, and probably a couple of Mallorcan club sandwiches waiting somewhere on the island. And, if things continue to go well, a Repsol garage at the top of a hill in Mallorca I haven't properly ridden well since 2022. I'll still ask Sue and Anne to have the jelly babies ready just in case.

Next

The next Drop Bar Diaries will cover the runway from here to Mallorca. Beautiful Days, Norfolk, September, the Yorkshire Dales week with Alan and Claire, and eventually the flight to Palma.

See you on the climb.