The Edit Cave, A Mossy Bottom, and the Climb at the End of a Year

A Drop Bar Diaries dispatch from the eve of Mallorca, in which plans change, three nights in Pompeii are in the process of becoming a 'thing', wrangled in a dark room, a dad watches his son's name roll past on a cinema screen in a building that used to be his first office, and the training arc arrives at its final uphill meters before the thing it was all built for.

Twelve months ago, give or take a week, I started an experiment. I would use an AI as a cycling coach. Not an occasional calculator, not a training schedule generator I would ignore by week three, but a daily collaborator. Every ride uploaded, every weigh-in logged, every honest conversation about tiredness, discipline or over-indulgence. Twelve months of pedalling, of pattern recognition across hundreds of data files, of nudging and correcting and the slow accumulation of an aerobic base that at fifty-five I had almost consigned to ancient history.

I am, as I type these words, mere days away from the specific climb that started it all. Sa Batalla, in Mallorca. The road where I bonked spectacularly in the autumn of 2025 and understood, at the top, that something had to change. Well, actually this realisation came 2km from the top if truth be told. The road the whole twelve-month arc has been pointing at from the beginning. The business end of the experiment is now, finally, in sight.

Which brings us to this blog, the last one I'll post before the thing itself.

The Edit Cave

For the best part of September I have lived in a dark room with flashing lights and loud music. This is not metaphor. It is a literal description of the intense post-production work on the three nights of filming we captured at Pompeii in July. Three nights of Marillion, Savatage, a choir and a twenty-seven piece orchestra in the amphitheatre. 18 terabytes of material. Oceans of footage. A finished edit that has to eventually come out the other end as a single coherent experience for the people who were there and for the much larger audience who weren't.

The particular rhythm of this kind of work is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't done it. You arrive at the desk at a sensible hour. You put the headphones on. You dim the room. You start cutting. At some point, which could be an hour or four hours later, you realise you need a cup of tea. You get up. You come back. You cut some more. You constantly check the picture against the music. You roll back. You cut again. The music is loud because the music is the point. The lights flash because the lights were part of the show and the show is what you're reconstructing. By mid-afternoon your eyes have the particular ache that comes from staring at the same frame of someone's face for ten minutes while deciding whether the camera angle serves the moment or betrays it. I've stared at h's face for the last twenty years. I probably know it better than he does.

It is a privilege to do this work. It is also deeply antisocial, deeply immersive. You emerge for meals and the odd necessary conversation and then you go back into the cave. September, for me, was mostly in the cave.

Which has an interesting relationship with cycling training. The two activities, on the face of it, could not be more different. One is hours of still sitting with your face lit by a monitor. The other is hours of moving with your face lit by whatever the Midlands weather happens to be chucking at you. But they share one thing: both require you to turn up, consistently, every day, and do the work even when the specific results of that day's effort are invisible. An edit you make at ten in the morning may not reveal whether it was the right cut until you watch the sequence back at the end of the day. A Zwift session you do on a Tuesday may not reveal whether it was the right session until you ride an outdoor route on Sunday and find yourself spinning on a gradient that used to grind. Both are quiet work. I don't shout about either. Both compound.

What I found this September is that the two reinforced each other. The discipline of the daily edit sessions bled into the discipline of the daily training sessions. The patience required to work on a project whose finished form you cannot yet see is the same patience required to trust an aerobic base building invisibly inside your body. Having both running in parallel made both easier to stick with. It calls back to my lockdown existence where my day was structured around the day of work ending with a daily spin on Zwift. It was a discipline that was uninterrupted whilst the whole world was similarly incarcerated. It was a discipline that I didn't continue, which is one probable root cause of my declining fitness once the world opened up again.

One other thing worth noting is that you can only sit in a dark room staring at monitors for so many hours before your body actively demands to go and ride a bike for an hour. The Zwift set-up in the garage, which I used to think of as a chore, became the thing that let me step outside my own head.

Six Sweet Spot Sessions and a Pattern

The training structure through September was simple. Twice a week, Sweet Spot work on Zwift. Once a week, an outdoor ride on familiar terrain. One day for strength or stretching, if I remember. One or two rest days. Repeat.

The Sweet Spot sessions started as two blocks of ten minutes at two hundred watts in August. By the end of September they had become two blocks of thirteen minutes at the same power. More work, same intensity. The interesting measurement is what happened to my heart rate across the series. Early September, at two hundred watts, average heart rate in the second block was 159. By mid September, same session, average heart rate was 155. Two weeks later, same session, same power, average still around 155 but delivered at a higher cadence of 86 rotations per minute. The engine was quietly getting better at doing the work. Not dramatically. Not in a way that produces a headline. In a way that compounds.

The outdoor rides told a complementary story. In early August I had ridden the Clent Hills loop and the numbers had matched up with Strava segment times I set in 2012. In late September I rode the same loop again, this time with the heart rate monitor still on and still recording, but with the heart rate field deliberately absent from my Garmin display. I wanted to ride by feel, and read the numbers only afterwards.

The ride came out two minutes slower in wet conditions over the same distance. My heart rate average, when the data was downloaded, was 1.8 bpm higher than August. My peak was 188. I had, apparently, worked substantially harder than I thought I was working. And I had thought I was riding easier. The gap between my perception and the numbers was the really interesting part.

What my body had done, over the course of twelve months, was recalibrate what effort feels like. The pace that would have felt like gritted teeth in October 2025 now feels like steady application in October 2026. The specific moment that crystallised this came on a stretch of road climbing at five per cent. In the old days, five per cent was where I started to grind, drop into a lower gear, and brace mentally for the next few minutes. On this ride, five per cent was where I noticed that I was spinning, breathing evenly, and that the climb was neither physically threatening nor mentally oppressive. Five per cent, incidentally, is also the kind of gradient that defines most of Sa Batalla. Not wishing to tempt fate, this bodes well.

The Behavioural Shift

Somewhere during the Clent ride I noticed something about my own climbing psychology that I had never fully articulated before. The old pattern, going back as long as I recall, was that when a hill got hard I would respond by trying harder. I would stand on the pedals. I would change up a gear and prove to myself that even though it was difficult I still had something in reserve. I would, in short, lean into the exertion.

What I found myself doing on this Clent ride, instead, was the opposite. When a section started to feel like it was getting on top of me, I would dial it back. Drop a gear. Spin instead of grind. Let the heart rate settle. Then, as I approached the top and the body said it had more to give and the heart had the capacity, lift the effort again at a sustainable rate.

This sounds like a trivial technical shift. It isn't. It represents a fundamental change in how I understand what a long ride asks of me, and it will make a huge difference going forward. The old mental model was that cycling was essentially a test of willpower against resistance. The new mental model is that cycling is a conversation with my own physiology, and that the mature move is to listen more than to shout. The willpower model is what gets you up a short hill. The conversation model is what gets you up a long one.

Twelve months of structured training have, apparently, among other things, taught me how to climb.

OSH Rise and the Equal PR

A quick aside about a short effort that mattered more than its twenty-two seconds would suggest.

OSH Rise is a tiny Strava segment, literally taking you past the entrance to Old Swinford Hospital School, two hundred and fifty metres of gentle rising ground on a road I have ridden one hundred and sixty-six times in total across the years. My personal best, twenty-two seconds, was set in April 2021 aged fifty-one, and had held through every attempt since.

On the Thursday shakedown ride after the bike came back from service, I rode OSH Rise without particularly thinking about it. Strava, after the ride, politely informed me that I had equalled my personal best. Twenty-two seconds. Age fifty-five.

In the normal course of ageing, my AI coach informs me that short-burst neuromuscular power is one of the first things you lose. The research literature apparently says you should expect to be slower by between one and two per cent per year once past fifty. Four years should have cost me somewhere between four and eight per cent. On a twenty-two second effort, that is about one second. It doesn't sound much and I should have been doing twenty-three or twenty-four. Instead I did twenty-two. Same as the age-fifty-one me. Something, in the training arc, has defended the top end alongside building the endurance.

The crucial takeaway here is that I don't want to lose this capacity. Short effort power has always been part of my cycling identity, the thing that lets me get across a gap or hold a wheel in a surge. After Sa Batalla, whatever happens there, we will build something into the winter programme to keep it where it is. My inner Cav is still alive!

A Night in London, A Night in Birmingham

I was, during September, let out of the edit cave for good behaviour. Twice.

The first was a trip to London to see Swim School. Loud, bright, energetic, exactly the kind of show that reminds you music is still being made with the same hunger it has always had. I've been raving about this band since Jake first introduced me to them a couple of years ago, and now they are on a very exciting trajectory having toured Europe with Suede and supported Biffy Clyro at their massive summer show. Keep your ears out for them. If there is any justice in the fickle world of music, they deserve success.

The second was Marillion at Symphony Hall in Birmingham on the Wednesday of my taper week. There was something quietly recursive about watching Marillion play live in September, in a British concert hall full of friends and colleagues, while most of my days were being spent editing their Pompeii footage. I had been in the amphitheatre with them in July. I was in a dark room with the recorded version of that night for most of September. And here I was watching them do it live again in Birmingham. It's been the same for the last two decades. Marillion are a constant presence in my ears and through my eyes, either on screen or up there on a stage in real life.

I was driving home so I didn't drink. Which meant that the Mallorca-ready alcohol-free streak, which started after some red wine one Saturday in the middle of September, held through Marillion night and continues to hold now at three weeks and counting. The man I was in 2024 would be amazed at this. The man I am in 2026 finds it genuinely unremarkable. It's inevitable though that a nice cold post-ride beer in Mallorca will break the draught. And that is just fine.

Yorkshire That Never Was

The plan said the week of the 26th of September to the 2nd of October would be a working holiday in the Dales with Alan and Claire. The bike would come with me. There would be rides on challenging roads: Buttertubs, Grinton, Redmire. There would be editing during the day as Al and Claire looked after their Wonky Tree Bookshop in Leyburn. There would be the specific pleasure of a week in that part of the world with people I love. There would be, at the end of it, a drive home, a quick packing session and a flight to Palma.

A few days before the trip however, Alan messaged. He had come down with a nasty cold. He wanted to warn me rather than risk passing it on and giving me something to carry onto the flight. That is the mark of a proper friend. Yorkshire was postponed. I'll head up there later in the year instead, kitted out with some long bib-shorts, arm warmers and long-fingered gloves.

What this meant practically was that my pre-Mallorca week has been spent at home rather than in the Dales. On balance this is probably safer. Home means my own bed, my own food, my own rhythms, no travel fatigue, no sharing Alan's germs, as much as I love him. The disappointment is real. The protection of the main event is also real. Alan did me a significant favour by making the call he did. He has my thanks and I will raise a Mallorcan lager to him when I'm out there.

Shaun The Sheep, Merry Hill, and a Father's Pride

I have left this to its own section because it absolutely deserves one.

My first job after leaving university was at the UCI Cinema at the Merry Hill shopping centre. I worked my way up to become a manager. That building was my introduction to proper working life. I know its auditoriums, its projector rooms, its carpets, its specific sticky-floor smell from spilled Coke and crushed popcorn in the dark. I spent years of my young adulthood there. It is embedded in me in a way that only your first serious job ever is. It was hard work with completely unsociable hours and I loved it.

A few weeks ago I sat in one of those same auditoriums, at Merry Hill, thirty-something years after I had worked in the building, watching Shaun The Sheep - The Beast of Mossy Bottom, Aardman's latest feature. The credits rolled at the end. My son Jake's name scrolled past on the screen. Twice. First in his main role as Second Assistant Editor, then as an Additional Voice (a yawning sheep he sheepishly told me). His first couple of credits on a feature film.

I sat in the half-light of a cinema I used to help run, in a building that still carries the shape of my younger self, and watched my son's name on the screen in a professional context he has earned entirely on his own. I don't have adequate words for what that moment felt like. The closest I can get is that it was a specific kind of circularity that life occasionally offers you and almost never announces in advance. First job in that building. Three decades later, my boy's name on the big screen in that same building, in a role that didn't exist for him to want when I was first scooping and serving popcorn when I was even younger than he is now.

Jake graduated, moved to London and started building his career in post production as a runner for Platform Post in Soho. After wrestling with the Beast of Mossy Bottom he is currently working as the Assistant Editor on Aardman's new pre-school series Let's Go Timmy. He has found a craft he loves at a studio that still cares about the physical and creative integrity of what it makes. Aardman is one of the places in the contemporary creative landscape that is keeping artificial intelligence very much at arm's length in its craft. Their work is still, properly, hand-made. Which, given the subject matter of these diaries, strikes me as something worth noting.

I am an enormously proud dad. The feeling has not faded. It isn't the kind of thing that fades, it only strengthens with each of Jake's achievements. And, although this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with me riding up a mountain in Mallorca, that pride feeds into my sense of well-being, which in itself is a huge motivator for pushing myself physically up the climbs.

The Weight That Won't Co-operate. Annoyingly.

I should mention the weigh-ins, briefly, because they have been one of the mild frustrations of September.

I first mustered the courage to step on the scales during the summer and what stared back at me was a reading of 110.7 kg (which was a shock, I don't mind admitting). I have been working, slowly and steadily, towards somewhere lighter. By the middle of August I was down to 107.6. By the middle of September, 107.2. On the Sunday weigh-in before I started writing this blog, I was back up to 108.2. More recently, down a little again.

This is annoying because I have been disciplined. I have been clean on alcohol for three weeks as I write this. I have been eating sensibly. The sweet spot work has been building leg muscle I can feel. My belt notch has moved. Friends have, independently and unprompted, commented that I look lighter and ride stronger on the hills. The scale, meanwhile, does its own thing and refuses to co-operate on a tidy weekly schedule.

What I have learned from moaning about this to my Coach is that the scale is merely a weekly data point in a longer trend, not a verdict. My body composition is changing in ways the scale is slow to pick up. Muscle gain and fat loss can happen at the same time and leave the number nearly flat. In the final two weeks before Mallorca, trying to force the scale down is counterproductive, because it compromises the energy reserves you need for the thing itself.

So I have stopped chasing the number. I will weigh in on Sunday mornings as always because I think the habit is useful. I will eat properly through the Mallorca trip because the climbs need fuelling. Not fuelling properly was the crux of last year's Sa Batalla bonk. If, on balance, the autumn produces another kilogram or two of real loss, that will be a bonus. If it doesn't, Sa Batalla will still happen, and it will happen in a body that is unarguably stronger and better conditioned than the one I took to the island twelve months ago.

The Final Taper

The last week before Mallorca has had its own small plot twists. A Clent Hills ride by feel on the Sunday that was supposed to be a gentle spin. A Sweet Spot session shifted from Wednesday to Thursday because the Edit Cave consumed me and my time. A Saturday social ride with the lads over to Alvechurch that was absolutely not in the plan but was impossible to resist when the WhatsApp pinged on the Friday night and JB described the route.

The AI coach, to its credit, has pointed out when I have been colouring outside the lines. The AI coach has also, when I pushed back, been willing to acknowledge that my body's actual recovery signature is a better data point than its abstract concern. The Saturday social ride, in the event, left me feeling fine within an hour of getting home. I was back in the garden tidying up before lunch. The ride that would have ended previous Saturdays with me zapped on the sofa for the rest of the day cost me, this year, essentially nothing. Which is as good a marker of what the training has done as any set of numbers.

The last forty-eight hours are now about rest, hydration, sleep, packing, and the drive to the airport. The bike has been serviced by Richard and rides like a dream. The flight to Palma is fast approaching. The bike bag is being packed with the specific items that matter - cycling kit, enough electrolyte tablets to see out any temperature spike, the Garmin, Clif Bars, chamois cream, factor fifty.

Three weeks alcohol-free. Legs feeling fresh. Mind, mostly, clear.

Next time. Cue the drum roll…

So, the next Drop Bar Diaries will be the big one. Twelve months since I started working with an AI coach. Twelve months of structured training, pattern recognition, data analysis, weight tracking, honest coaching conversations, pushback in both directions. Twelve months of the quiet daily work that compounds.

It will cover the Mallorca trip. It will cover the climb itself, Sa Batalla, the thing that started all of this when I bonked on it last October. It will cover the riding with a group of friends I've been travelling to the island with for the best part of a decade. It will cover the Mallorcan food, the Mallorcan weather (which does look a little dodgy in the forecast), and almost certainly a Mallorcan lager or two.

And it will attempt to answer, honestly, the question the whole project has been pointing towards - has this experiment worked?

I don't know the answer yet. The last time I rode up Sa Batalla it broke me. One year on I am riding a different body, carrying a different head, after twelve months of actual, real training structure. All the signs over the last year say the engine is in a very different place. The real test is a specific climb on a specific day in a specific set of weather conditions with a specific body on a specific bike. The engine is built. The body is prepared. The head is calm.

Everything that could be done has been done. Now I go to find out. Wish me luck.

See you on the other side of the climb.