Calorie counting

Having managed to get a few rides in on consecutive days of consecutive weekends, I decided to tempt fate and see how much lard has dropped off.

Happily I am now under the 12st mark but our scales aren't exactly the most accurate device. I recorded weights of 7st 4 and 3st 2 but decided on 11st 12 as being the most accurate/ least inaccurate. Anyway, sitting on the bike for more than a couple of hours usually means I need some food so as not to "bonk" - I spectacularly blew up in my first year of cycling on "100 in 8" reliability ride. My late father in law had to shovel Walkers crisps in to me and I can still recall licking the salt off the inside of the three packets I'd necked. Currently, I use a Science in Sport electrolyte drink on every ride, but sometimes a "little bit of what you fancy" helps not only get some carbs back in the tank, but also gives a little mental "pick me up".

If you are on a budget (and are not a strict veggie or vegan) you can look at jelly as a cheap source of energy. A 100g wedge will put 296Kcal back in to the tum; an equivalently sized PowerBar will produce 363Kcal but will cost £1.35 - a quid more than the jelly. Horses for courses though - as it's a bit of a chore to dice up cubes of jelly and clingfilm them so that you can scoff them on the move. Unwrapping jelly with gloves on, while riding at 15-20mph over the pot-holed and icy roads of Arctic Bedfordshire is akin to peeling a tangerine in your pocket on the dodgems.

Somewhere in the "compromise" zone are these little beauties - the School Bar. In nice 20g bars, these are made from real fruit and would churn out 335Kcal if put over the bunsen burner. I now seem to be the "dealer" for school bars and having lured on one of the chain-gang in to my suger-free, fruit based cyclo-den-of-iniquity I may be on to a lucrative sideline. Illicit fruit dealing is not on the Statute Book yet I don't think.

Given it's Christmas time I suspect that Jelly Babies will be under many cyclo-Christmas Trees. And we all remember who used to love Jelly Babies don't we and he can't be wrong.