A quiet week

After the full weekend two weeks ago, last weekend was a bit different.

With my regular climbing partners on family duty on Saturday and Cath's biking partners likewise we ended up going for a bike ride from Hetton up to Bordley and Weets Top. To say it was wet is a bit of an understatement, I was surprised that things had turned so quickly as there hasn't been that much rain. Winterburn reservoir was full, it was less than 50% just two weeks ago according to Cath. this is the reservoir that feeds the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the low level is what caused the canal to be shut during the summer.

I was getting serious chain suck when in the granny ring so even the short steep climbs had to be in the middle ring, quite hard work! Once back home, a good clean of the bike and it was in to the LBS for a full service.

The weather forecast was giving rain moving north overnight as far as Sheffield or thereabouts. 6am on Sunday morning and we are woken by a deluge on the roof of the house. This continued most of the day so no chance of getting out climbing. The beck in the bottom of the valley had risen so much we could hear it from in the house - it's around 400m away! I've only seen it higher a couple of times in the eight years we've been here.

Annoyingly the rest of the week has been generally fine so I've been biking in to work. I tend to take it easy on the way in so that I don't raise a sweat then push it coming home, this is helped by the fact that it is nearly all downhill on the way in to work so is obviously uphill when coming home. On Thursday there wasn't a head wind for once and I got the various traffic lights and queues just right. It's always amusing to be overtaken by an aggressive driver who then has to pull up by the queue just 50 or 100m ahead and you just cruise past. Going in to the village I was overtaken by a Range Rover but solid traffic in the centre meant that I was nearly at the top of the hill a mile on the other side (the hill itself is a mile long) before they overtook me again. In the end I got home in just over 20 minutes, my second ever fastest time - I've been under 20mins just the once.

It seems like the knee has settled down now. Whether that is due to weight loss or simply that the body has readjusted to me not doing any running I'm not sure. Just hope it continues.