Day 3: 15 mins of meditation using the Calm app.* Stop me if you’ve heard these before: ‘Follow your breath.’ ‘Say to yourself “I am breathing in. I am breathing out”.’ ‘Focus your awareness on your breath.’ ‘Your breath is your anchor; a safe harbour you can return to during the day.’ Personally, some of […]
Read more "#MEDITATEFOR30: DAY 3 – Follow Your Breath OR How to Use Kraftwerk On Your Bike Ride"So, can meditation make you a better cyclist? Can it improve your performance? Can it make you enjoy cycling more? To try to get some answers, I’ve determined to try to meditate every day, for 30 days and see if this has any effect on how I ride my bike. But where to start? Let’s […]
Read more "#MeditateFor30: Day 2 – Getting your OMMMM On"Tim Ferriss, writing in Tools of Titans, maintains that in order to feel the first benefits of a regular meditation practice, you need to meditate daily for a minimum of 7 days. Anything else, he says, and you’re really wasting your time. This got me thinking: I’ve long heard folks extol the virtues of regular […]
Read more "#MeditateFor30: Day 1 – Does Meditation Make You A Better Cyclist?"You know the story. You haven’t been on your bike in weeks, due to the pressures of work, family, life. Your fancy bike is still encrusted with the winter road grime of the last country you lived in. It’s a sunny day, not too hot. You have a few hours on your hands, a luxury. […]
Read more "Last Exit to Monserrat"Two weeks from today, Furious Riding will be starting the journey from London to Paris in support of Bloodwise, a UK-based charity which raises money for blood cancer research. I will be riding from London to Paris for the second time, after completing the ride in 2015. It was one of the greatest experiences of […]
Read more "London to Paris 2016"I used to live in Brussels, until I left, on February 29th, this year. People who have never been to Brussels and have never enjoyed cycling up a hill say “oh you must have loved that, it’s pan-flat”. Cycling people who have never been to Belgium, but have watched the Tour of Flanders, or Liege-Bastogne-Liege […]
Read more "Barcelona’s biggest, best kept secret"The sun is setting. I’m belting along a dirt track through the Collserola forest, at the back of Barcelona, on a quick 30 minute ride before dinner. I go left at a fork in the road, never been down this way before. The trail corkscrews down into a valley and across a stream which leads into […]
Read more "March of the Pigs"Forget about the gods of cycling. What about the everyday heroes of every day cycling?
Read more "We Can Be Heroes"Nearly two weeks have passed since 3,500km, three-week cycling circus of the Tour de France has passed. While it perhaps unfairly overshadows other grand tours (Italy, Spain) it never fails to capture the imagination. I watched the final kilometres of penultimate stage through my fingers, convinced that Ion Izagirre Insausti was going to aquaplane off the road as […]
Read more "Transcontinental: The Madness of a Long Distance Bicycle Race"Nūlla umquam dē morte hominis cūnctātio longa est JUVENAL vi.221 When a human life is at stake, no delay is ever excessive 1 Waindale Close Mount Talbot Halifax Yorkshire “Dear friends, There as promised are the shots I took on the Clifden Cycling Club’s Sunday run. I enjoyed your company very much […]
Read more "Brief Encounter"
FURIOUS RIDING 