(This is a weekly blogging series, started before I did my first weeklong bicycle tour around the little belt on the Danish Baltic Sea Bicycle Route.  Now I want to do the whole Bicycle Route next year, and for that, I do some shorter tours to stay in training, study Danish, do other sports, sew some things, plan, map, buy, and worry. And blog about that every Sunday… it is an adventure already.)

Moin

I bought myself 2 new books this week, and I will incorporate their wisdom into my (daily) preparation for the bicycle tour:

A Yoga-book for cyclists. I was looking for books that tell me how I can train for cycling using other sports. Also, because all bicycle-training-books are only about road-racing and not about travelling.  I want to add some strength in general and in those areas that cycling neglects or even hurts. I do not need to stay as light as possible, instead, some muscles make travelling by bicycle easier. I also was looking for a good stretching routine. So I went to the bookstore and asked a salesperson. And she found this book for me. It contains different yoga-flows for stretching and strength, so at the moment I am doing one strength-flow in the morning and one stretching flow at night. While on tour, I probably will be doing only stretching flows. I bought it on Tuesday and started on Wednesday, so I still have not gone through all the flows and for that, I still need to read a lot to do them right. But I have a good memory so soon I will just check up which flow it is that day and then do them by memory. I do feel good about this,  I will keep you updated if I notice any changes in my cycling.

The other book does not scream bicycle, right? Well, there is, of course, a reason for this. When I came back from my last bicycle tour, my left foot started hurting. I cannot remember if it started while on tour or right after I was back, but it was definitely connected to cycling. Since then it hurts quite some days, mostly when I wore a little higher heels. I had some slight defective position in my feet my whole life, and I guess now it has gotten worse. Since I do not just want it to get even worse, and I do not want to get operated, I decided I would look into training against those defective positions. Or at least try. And another nice salesperson helped me find this book on Friday, so I am training my feet at night since then, after my stretching yoga flow. I will keep you updated if my feet will get better. 😉

The Yoga-book is translated into German and originally in English (yoga for cyclists), for the feet you probably can find something similar in your preferred language.

I studied about an hour of Danish this week, went to swim-training (45 minutes), did  5 days with 2 yoga-flows, 3 nights training feet, 2 strength workouts and cycled 33.21km in 2:06:02 h.

 keep exploring and smiling

your Fairy