Hey everyone, it's time for another cycling post! At the time of writing it's Sunday morning 8:15am here, and I THOUGHT spring was here... but when the darkness was chased away by the sun I could see some ice on the roofs of the houses behind us...

0 degrees Celcius at the moment, and we will be on our bikes in about two hours to that's going to be wearing winter gear again.

My daughter now was pretty sure she likes cycling so I went ahead and bought her some more gear, when a child is just starting with a new hobby there's always a certain risk of them abandoning it after a couple of weeks because it wasn't what they expect or just don't have the perseverance to push through the hard start, building up strength and stamina.
She was now stealing part of my gear, which was a little annoying... 😇 and so my wife said.. just see what's on sale in the outlets, she has size S so that's a good size to stay left behind and not get sold easily and so I did, sometimes I do listen to my wife. 😇

I got her this winter jacket that's for temperatures between 0 and 10 degrees but I have experienced I wear my winter jacket up to 12 or 13 degrees when it's windy as well because it blocks the wind a lot better and I don't have a proper wind jacket, they're really expensive.

Retail price for the Sportful jacket was a whopping €179 but was now on sale for €34,95 and I bought a good pair of GripGrab Ride II Windproof Spring-Autumn gloves as well, her basic cycling set is now pretty complete because she already had a bib short.

On one of my jobs for work last week, a wealthy customer gave me and my colleague a €25 tip each, I bought this nice chain breaker with, I have a small chain breaker in my backpack for when I need emergency repairs but I found out replacing my chain it's really small and you have to apply a lot of force to push the pin out and while doing so, the chain bends a little bit - good enough when you're on the side of the road but this won't be the only chain I'm replacing with about 4000 yearly kilometers so I think this is a good buy for my tip. 🤗

First MTB Experience

Well, not my first experience obviously but last Sunday when I already made most of my previous Chit Chat post, we went to the woods because my daughter really, really wanted to experience what it was to be on a proper MTB Trail, it was a lot of fun and although she was swearing a lot because she was a little bit scared and overwhelmed by the trail, after a couple of runs over the same part she found it actually was a lot less scary to ride than it looked beforehand, this part of the trail is the harder RED section but unfortunately the BLUE section which is for inexperienced riders is further away, out of her reach just yet. This part is made of trails going up and down and left and right with some consecutive rollers, sharp bends and banked berms and the elevation difference is constantly about 1.5 meters up and down so nothing too crazy but still a lot of difference from what she's used to, just cycling on a paved road on her regular bike she goes to school with.

Her own planned maximum distance was 23km, but because she wanted to ride the trail multiple times her total distance was over 28km which was actually pretty good in hindsight, because on the trail her speed is still low - she first has to learn how to ride and handle her bike so it's not very tough on her body and the distance can go up. So today, we will be riding the full red loop of the trail!

On my own ride, right after bringing my daughter back home I cycled right past the trail again on my way back, and while the ride has been a zone 2 training until then, I figured because I was on the trail that day before I might as well go at it again, bringing my total distance and intensity up. An average 25.5 km/h including a couple of kilometers off-road technical terrain is pretty fast and the total distance for the day was 70 kilometer, a new yearly high until now.

Getting sucked all-in, protein, casein and why it's important.

I don't know what it's like for other people, but for me when I really like something I'm going in deeper and deeper. My daughter is exactly the same with this while the other one is more like my wife who can experience and enjoy things casually.

Last weeks I did more exercises off of the bike, just for general core strength and fitness which will also help me preventing back and knee pain and I'm looking more in taking in enough proteins on my cycling days and the day after and eating a bowl of cottage cheese (kwark) before going to bed.

For a cyclist, or any other sports - recovery happens mostly while you sleep. During a ride, your muscles get tiny amounts of damage and use up stored energy. At night, your body repairs those muscles and makes them stronger. Protein is the key building block for this repair process.
So if you don’t get enough protein, your muscles cannot repair as efficiently, and recovery takes longer.

Cottage cheese is especially useful at night because it contains casein protein, casein works differently from fast proteins like whey, casein digests slowly and it releases amino acids gradually over several hours.

This means your muscles receive protein throughout the night instead of a quick spike of protein in your blood, you get a steady supply while you sleep, which supports continuous muscle repair.

The main reason I started with eating it is because amino acids keep entering the bloodstream overnight, so your body is less likely to break down muscle tissue to recover. 😃

I am now eating this before bed for a couple of weeks and started with trying the cottage cheese with quite a lot of fat in it - about 8%, since I'm only losing weight since I started cycling I lost 4kg already and with a 68kg body mass, losing weight is not important at all for me. However, because too much fat isn't good for the heart and veins I experimented with the no fat version this week BUT OH MY GOD it's so much different. 🤣

It has a bitter after taste, so I started reading on sport forums how I could make it taste better and tried some ingredients which did help but I also read a comment from someone who said 'Life is too short to eat the no fat version every week'. 🤣 And I have to agree, taking care of my body is really important at this point for me but eating something without enjoying it is a step too far, even for an idiot like me. 😆

Riding with strong winds

The nice weather conditions we still had last Sunday, ended on Tuesday and more unstable weather arrived in The Netherlands, bringing wind and rain. On my ride last Thursday there was no rain and even some sun but the wind was really strong with 30km/h and gusts up to 60km/h, especially the dark blue area on the left of the screen going South was really tough, there's only meadows there and nothing to shield me against the wind so it was slow going. The training and taking care of my body is amazing and I was actually amazed that although the wind did slow me down a lot I could still keep going and not get exhausted so this is an extra reason for me to get excited even more.

I stopped at this windmill to take some pictures for my post (so yes @nanixxx I was thinking about Hive again on my ride haha)

Cycling Chit Chat

Aaaand here she is with the weekly prompts, maybe chat GPT can help you think about cool questions?

What type of bike do you use and why does it work well for you?

I ride a Scott Scale 950 Aluminium Hardtail Mountain Bike 🙂

If your bike could talk, what would it say about you?

Probably 'when do we go out to play again!!??' 😇

Which song pushes you on when you feel you can’t go any further?

I never listen to music while cycling, I think it's dangerous to close yourself off from your environments while participating in traffic, even on roads where not a lot of traffic is plus, I like the 'flow' you can get in to, just alone with your thoughts and the wind flowing around you with the continuous rhythm of the pedal strokes. 😊

Stats

I almost completed the first 1000km for this year, I needed to pass the first 1k by the end of the month to keep on track for my 4000km yearly goal. Being ahead is nice because there will happen unexpected events like getting sick or holidays I maybe will ride less on, or maybe more I will have to see.

1406 words already so I leave it at this and as usual add the Chit Chat Prompt tomorrow 😊

A day later...

So, this is it for this week, I already have more to tell but I'll save it for next weeks post, be safe out there and thanks for stopping by!