The days are getting shorter and I’m spending precious daylight minutes in traffic jams to and from work. Fortunately, we do have showers at work and I can take flexible lunch breaks, so the obvious solution is to exercise at noon, when temperatures are at their daily peak and there’s plenty of daylight.

Since I can still only do very limited running, the obvious weapon of choice is my mountain bike. I’m still not a very experienced rider (banged my left shin on the pedal after attempting to ride down a few steps) and there’s plenty of people faster than me, but I’ll take any fitness gains I can get.

Did 19.2km in 52 minutes; which translates to an average speed of 21.9km/h. When I ignore 3,5 minutes of breaks (traffic lights, intersections and a little recovery after a particularly nasty climb) that average slightly improves to 23,5km/h. Covered 239m of elevation.

I keep thinking that maybe a road bike would be a good thing to have, but then I ride on sub-par streets around Luxembourg and wonder how much more I would be shaken up on something that doesn’t have suspension like my hardtail MTB.