December 2022 Stats and 2022 Summary

Well most of December 2022 was spent on the Schwinn doing FulGaz challenges but we flew out to Fuerteventura at oh-dark-hundred hours yesterday and today I finished off the year with a real-life 15km road ride on the MTB. So here’s December’s stats showing the 650km overall distance:

December 2022 Stats

December 2022 Stats

That means that 2022’s stats overall are:

Activities: 306; Distance: 2,960.23 km; Time: 194:39:42; Calories: 122,924.

As for my weight, well it’s too late to measure like for like today because I’ve had coffee, freshly-squeezed orange juice and croissants out in the garden this morning, but yesterday’s weight was 88.3kg.  That’s down by 9.6kg (21.2lbs or 1½ stone) from New Year’s Day 2022 when my weight was 97.9kg. That’ll do, pig!

November 2022 Stats

Well thanks to that utter shitshow that is Brexit, we had to fly back to the UK mid-November so as not to outstay our welcome in the EU.

This meant that there was a switch from the longer real-world rides I was doing on a relatively heavy mountain bike back to indoor cycling on the Schwinn, so it was back to using FulGaz again.  I’ve mentioned I decided – very rashly – to do their “LEJOG Challenge“, so the mileage (and time in our gym) has risen a tad…

This month’s total therefore is up to 554.59km.

My weight at the start of the month was 91kg and at the end it had surpassed my first goal and stood at 88.9kg.  This is down from 98.2kg as recently as mid-August (1 stone 4lbs weight loss).

FulGaz LEJOG Stage 1: Lands End to St. Ives

As I mentioned in this post, I’m doing the Land’s End to John O’Groats challenge on FulGaz and this was the first day and first stage:

One small problem: although the 20-stage challenge runs until February 2023, I won’t be near the Schwinn to ride it after Christmas as I’ll be back out in Fuerteventura then. Ah… Looks like it’s going to be a tad intense.

FulGaz LEJOG Challenge

If you’ve been checking in on this blog with my monthly workout stats and/or following my latest individual workout activities over here, then you’ll know that while I’m in the UK, I tend to just use our Schwinn 800IC static bike and I’m pretty much settling for FulGaz as my preferred workout program, given its “adaptive” video rides.

I’ve received an update from FulGaz today about the “LEJOG Challenge“: Land’s End to John O’Groats over 500km and 20 stages, most being over an hour and some like Hardknott Pass being a little bit ‘bumpy’ too…

Still, what could possibly go wrong?

The Cookaway

So I mentioned that this mob had used The Email Bureau to send some spam to one of my work email addresses.

Having failed to find a contact email address for them, I went onto Trustpilot to leave them a review:

Spam on the Menu?

They must be struggling, because why else would they decide to employ the services of those spammers, The Email Bureau Limited, to send me spam today?

Edit: I’ve emailed them a screenshot as they denied spamming me…

Edit: they’re now whining that the spam didn’t come from them, but they still fail to mention that it was their campaign, paid for my them, presumably? If not, are they suing The Email Bureau Limited? No, I didn’t think so…

They responded:

Update – Thanks for the screenshot Richard. I’m afraid this is not directly from us and you should pick this up with The Email Bureau to get them to take your name off their mailing list. I see you’ve provided a similar review re spam email to 3 other businesses and I wonder whether you are on a mailing list that you need to get delisted from. We haven’t emailed you directly and you are not on our email database so we cannot even remove/unsubscribe you.

Best wishes
Team Cookaway
———————————————————————–

Hi Richard,

Thanks for getting in touch.

We have no record of you in our order or email systems and have not activated anything with The Email Bureau.

We have sent you a request via Trustpilot to provide further information so we can investigate your claim properly. Please do get in touch via Trustpilot or directly through our website so we can look into this matter.

For any such issues, we always appreciate if you can contact us first and allow us to respond before leaving a negative review especially when we have no record of any prior communication with you.

Many thanks
Team Cookaway

At no time do “Team Cookaway” deny that this was their marketing campaign. The closest they get is the “we haven’t emailed you directly” bollocks. No, you paid someone else to, you bunch of fuckwits!

 

October 2022 Stats

We flew out to our place in Fuerteventura again on Saturday 1st October and after the weekend I started back with the real-world cycling on the Monday, having decided to up the ante a tad with my distances and to make sure I was following my consultant’s orders to do at least 30 minutes a day.

I’m still pleased with the result: 331.33km this month (including walking).

October 2022 Stats

In other news, we’ve gone a bit keto with our diets and the results are promising: I weighed 93.3kg on the Garmin Index S2 scales we have here at the start of the month and today I weigh 91kg (up 0.5kg from yesterday morning, which was a new low since the crash and muscle-wasting in July 2019).

The Email Bureau

Well it looks like Damon Bennett’s little spammer has been busy recently, unlike his latest moribund company, The Consumer Leads Bureau, which is in the process of being stuck off.

Lots of shite from him and all – amazingly – from companies I will never use…

Still…

“Relax
The data is GDPR compliant.”

Is it? Is it REALLY?

September 2022 Stats

With the Schwinn’s arrival came physiotherapy, pain consultations and then experiments with Apple Fitness+, the first year’s free subscription to Bowflex’s JRNY app, and a trial of FulGaz.  The latter two are different from Fitness+ in that Apple are offering different duration classes only whereas the other two offer virtual rides using video of the actual routes.

In FulGaz’s case, they are adaptive workouts: speeding up or slowing down the videos to suit your pace/power which the app reads from the Schwinn.  They’re also linked to my Garmin f?nix 7S for my heart rate.

The other benefit of using FulGaz is that after each ride, it emails you a FIT file which you can import into Garmin Connect giving you the full details of the ride.  JRNY does not do this, sadly.

So hitting the Schwinn every has been beneficial for me, but also for my weight which has been coming down slowly, thereby improving the load on my knee.

Here’s my stats for the 399km – mainly virtual/indoor – in September 2022:

September 2022 Statistics