ClimbWatts

I'm 45, I work rotating shifts, and I ride a trainer in the corner of a room. That's the whole setup.

In January this year I weighed 98 kg. For most of my thirties the bike had sat in a shed, and what got me back on it wasn't a race — it was getting winded on stairs at work. I started riding again in the spring, mostly 11-kilometre commutes, and in July I got ambitious and rode 100 km in one go. It took five and a half hours and it hurt for two days. I finished it, but I finished it badly, and that's the part that stuck.

The site is called ClimbWatts because of the one number that actually decides how a ride feels: watts per kilogram. It moves from both ends. Push the watts up, bring the kilos down, and the same hill stops being a negotiation. 98 kg and no power meter in January; 86.75 kg and 228 W today — 2.63 W/kg. Everything on this site is the work of climbing that number, written down in public so I can't quietly round it up.

The hard part was never motivation. It's the roster. A week with four night shifts and a week with four days off are not the same week, and every training plan I could find pretended they were. So I built one that doesn't: it reads my morning numbers, knows which shift I'm on, and moves the hard sessions to the days that can actually take them. Everything on this site — every watt, every kilo, every rating — is the real thing, published as it happens, including the weeks that go badly.

If you also train around shifts and want to compare notes, write to me. I answer everything.