2026 Zwift as a recovery tool 🚲❤️‍🩹🚲

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Zwift turns your garage into a home

If you’ve not tried zwift, then just imagine being in your garage, on a bicycle, a fan is on MAX and blowing sweat from your face, over your shoulders and onto the electrical cables behind you. The happy Zwift music is encouraging your to smile and have fun, while the relentless attacks coming from the peleton in your friendly club meetup turn your breathing into a soundscape that would cause Darth Vader to consider a doctor’s visit.

2026 ❤️‍🩹 CResT & Physical Education

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TLDRToo Long; Didn’t Read;

The NHS Surrey CResT programme is available to anyone undergoing cardiac or pulmonary rehabilitation. 8 weeks of physiotherapy with a truly wonderful team of physiotherapists who brought joy and knowledge to every session. I learned lots and left the programme with a right knee that works better and an extra 50W on my cycling ftp for a heart rate of 120bpm. Each Wednesday felt a bit like putting my PE kit on and going to school again for sports day. The major difference bing that I actually enjoyed the entire CResT programme. All credit to the CResT team - they're wonderful!

2026-01-28 Wednesday

Session 1: A great flock of people of wildly different fitness, age and outlook guided with care and empathy by the enthusiastic physio team. Blood pressure & heart rates taken during the checking. Name badge pinned to my chest with Heart Rate limits; probably to help me remember to moderate my effort, but probably also to remind me of my own name should I push too hard.

2026 ❤️‍🩹 Recovery Diary

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR Too Long; Didn’t Read;

A remarkable recovery from 2025 leads to regaining lost fitness in 2026. My journey ….

2026-01-09 Friday The Zwift stationary bike app provides a nice controlled way to manage an aerobic exercise regime. This week’s plan allowed a 129_bpm maximum heart rate, which is getting close to the 80% maximum of 135_bpm where the LRB will spend the rest of the year tootling around at a level 2 ride. Today was the LRB’s first quality ride since stent day. Good heart rate management gave a 1 hour ride with an average of 121_bpm. He briefly hit 138_bpm during a 10 second loss of discipline as he sprinted for the top of the Col du Peyresourde. Overall power was 130W or in cycling terms, about ⅓ of a Tadej Pogacar. The LRB said “That’s a win”.

2026-01-07 Wednesday The LRB had his first check-up with the cardiologist. To score at least one “who’s a good boy” point, he meticulously printed out all the data from the last 3 month of heart, diet and exercise information. The cardiologist interpreted the echo-cardiogram results so that the LRB’s drug-addled brain could understand. Basically she reported that the LRB has only a tiny bit of muscle damage in the top left part of his heart and has achieved a quite remarkable recovery 😁. The LRB therefore asked if he could exercise at his previous level. The cardiologist gave him a very silent, very hard stare that would have made Paddington cry. Guess he’ll be taking it gently then!

2026-01-04 Sunday The LRB’s super flowing blood and thin skin picked a fight with the bag of coffee beans. Apparently, if you snip the bag with scissors and then hold the bag at just the right angle, you can slice your finger sufficiently badly to require 4 band-aids and over 48 hours of compression to stop the bleeding. Curiously, the LRB’s keyboard now looks like a prop from a Quentin Tarantino fight scene.

❤️‍🩹 2025 Recovery Diary

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR Too Long; Didn’t Read;

My definition of prison:

Sit still
Keep your heart rate low
Don't get excited.

The month-by-month recovery story, newest on top, oldest at the bottom.

See also my 2025 recovery-plan , latest BP-HR graphs & 2026 blog .

2025-12-31 Wednesday The LRB decided that healthy living is on pause for celebrating New Year. Surely a couple of glasses of wine and some full fat deserts won’t be bad? Turns out they were just fine. The game of left-handed ball-pein nail hammering however…..

2025-12-25 Thursday “Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas” said the LRB. All dietary and alcoholic restrictions were paused as cheese, sausage, creamy sauces and lashings of Christmas cheer were consumed. Seems that the new dietary regime is a bit of a habit and the LRB consumed about 10 litres of water to “feel right”. On the plus side his step count to and from the toilet amounted to nearly 8km!

2025-12-24 Wednesday The sleuth team solved the Advent Cluedo puzzle through raw intelligence, some beers and some wine. The LRB was looking forward to a couple of days of saturated fats, alcohol and sugars. “The occasional celebration is OK” said the doctor and Christmas only comes once a year. There’s a 10 year old Malbec in the cupboard waiting for tomorrow’s lunch. Nice.

2025-12-22 Monday Cardiac rehabilitation day. The LRB took train and Brompton to get to the hospital. A beautiful yet chilly ride got me ready for the tests to see if I was fit enough to start a physio programme to ward off the bad symptoms of heart disease. The assessor and I got on really well. He was a runner and his dad was a cyclist. We talked about local half marathon while completing 20 minutes of lifestyle questions and completing the full fitness test without getting over 110bpm. “Just be aware”, he advised, “that for most attendees, the sessions will be the longest exercise of the week. For you, it will be a rest day. Ask good questions of the physios!”. Great outcome. I’m super impressed with the NHS cardio-prevention teams. They’re really trying to stop people dropping dead prematurely.

2025-12-02 Tuesday “Reduce your alcohol consumption” advised all my doctors. Yay! For the last few years, I’ve been invited to attend the wonderful nxtedition nxtdays in Copenhagen. This year we toured the Carlsberg brewery and I gave myself a special “rules don’t apply” day. I tasted all the beers and the food was healthy and wonderful. I love working with Scandinavian companies. Their work-life balance philosophy makes life super-rewarding.

2025-11-22 Saturday “Don’t lift heavy thing” advised all my doctors. My daughter’s helpers got the hard jobs of carrying the boxes while I mended things, drilled holes and made curtains more vertical and practical than box fodder. The numbers on the devices were showing that moving around was making me feel better and more human and healthier.

2025-11-18 Tuesday “Don’t get eaten by dinosaurs” said no-one ever. Today was a healthy visit to the Natural History Museum with my wife and a good friend. A wonderful relaxing, low stress, gentle day with nothing to reverse my recovery. Jungle Rexy was actually quite friendly.

2025-11-18 Tuesday “Don’t get too excited” advised all my doctors. I suspected that 2 days in London debating the future of film, television and streaming technology should be nice and calming. Word had got out about me having a heart attack and so the amount of attention/hand-shaking/hugging/physical-contact-empathy was very high. Despite the best efforts of Charlotte (my minder) the numbers on the Blood Pressure monitor hit 128/80 which is the highest non-exercise number since I bought the monitor. Nice people can be be more stressful than I thought.

2025-11-16 Sunday The Lab Rat Bruce(LRB) sat on the turbo trainer and was mildly excited to be able to hit this week’s peak heart rate of 107. This meant he could actually get some feedback from his legs. 45mins duration with only 2 x 10 minutes of lapsed concentration later, he had an average HR of 101 and spent the rest of the day with the lowest average blood pressure yet recorded 114/72. The drugs work!

2025-11-15 Saturday The prisoner walked away from his yoga mat with an unusual gate. “I’ve decided”, he said to the warden, “that I no longer Identify as prisoner. I identify as Self-Experimenting-Subject-Geriatric-Bruce-On-Therapy or SEGSBOT”. By coincidence, a couple of hours of forced readjustment therapy in front of classic period costume dramas enabled the prisoner to spontaneously offer never to utter that acronym again. He now identifies as the LRB - the Lab Rat Bruce** - pronounced the LURB.

2025-11-14 Friday The prisoner looked at the sleep quality graph from his watch. There seems to be a strong correlation between good sleep and getting the heart rate up into zone 1 (80-100bpm) or zone 2 (100-130bpm). Strong intellectual engagement (e.g. teaching) improves sleep, but sitting on your bum wading through 9 months of neglected emails may be de-stressing, but does not result in good sleep. 50 mins in zone 1 on the bike this morning will be inspected tomorrow.

2025-11-13 Thursday The prisoner went to the GP and spent a good 15 minutes discussing pills, recovery, shaving cuts and drugs. He says the executive summary is a resounding “Pat on the head” with a side order of “Who’s a good boy!”. Blood test dates will be brought forward. It’s unclear if the comment “A bit thick” referred to the prisoner’s blood or the LRB’s intelligence. He also dropped the observation that I was pre-diabetic and would I like to go on a course to help manage it. “Why not?”, I replied.

2025-11-11 Tuesday “Keep your stress low” advised all my doctors. Unfortunately, nobody told the elevator at Elstree that. After a tour of the site, including the former Wicked stage, 12 of us piled into the lift and it got stuck for 30 minutes. Luckily nobody had claustrophobia or life threatening flatulence. My heart rate peaked at 61, so the jokes I was telling were obviously up to my usual high standard.

2025-11-10 Monday 3 weeks post angioplasty and it’s time to try working. I’m booked to deliver a 3 day course on workflows, AI and cyber security at Sky Studios Elstree. Gentle walking, trains and overnight in the Premier Inn means my heart rate should stay below 100bpm if I stay calm. The first day - perfect health and an awesome cohort of enthusiastic students.

2025-11-06 Thursday The well rested and well fed prisoner spent an hour of gently pedalling while paying attention to his corporeal feedback and reported feeling brilliant. Zwift has a new Makuri Island route that’s like a cave based Avatar fever dream - very pleasant. Maybe relaxation captivity is OK after all.

2025-11-05 Wednesday 3am wide awake for no apparent reason. The prisoner checks: has the warden woken him? nope. heart racing? nope - 42bpm. blood pressure spike? nope 116/73. suddenly figured out the story arc for delivering next week’s course at Elstree studios? Yep. Goddam brain.

2025-11-04 Tuesday Looking at the gifted bag of beetroot, the prisoner considered that his life must now encompass dietary habits that he would once have classed batshit crazy. No more grapefruit juice, his favourite, full butter croissants will be a scarce treat for special occasions and gone is the goats butter. In comes the olive oil sprayer to enliven his sourdough vegemite toast. Seems like batshit crazy can also be delicious.

After morning yoga & zwift, the prisoner reports that there is no correlation between thin, floppy, fluid blood and soft, floppy, fluid, flexible joints. He can however feel the difference between pedalling gently at 100bpm and 90bpm but not 90bpm & 80bpm. This week’s slightly elevated heart rate allowance means pedalling is less about concentrating on heart rate and more about listening to the body performing as a whole. Yay.

2025-11-03 Monday The prisoner finally figured out that the microwave medicine spreadsheet would look better if he used a ruler to draw the lines. It took him a while to figure out how the ruler worked because it lacked any battery or internet connection. The prisoner eventually figured it out. He can now log average daily blood pressure and heart rate. The brain cell monitor may be broken or maybe the brain cell remains unused.

2025-11-02 Sunday The prisoner awoke and went straight to his happy place. Today the happy place was the indoor bicycle hooked up to Zwift. 50 mins, 213 calories and an average of 90bpm later he was rewarded with an outraged “I can smell you from here” by one of his guards. The prisoner was then informed that he was wrong about his happy place. Apparently it’s the shower. The prisoner has a new continuous blood pressure monitor from Hilo which shows low sleep numbers and optimal day numbers. This indicates that his new thinner blood is working.

2025-11-01 Saturday Balance Yoga was performed by the prisoner is a style that paid tribute to the first ever colour commercial he saw on TV in September 1974 when he arrived in the UK. The legendary Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down song has been a permanent inspirational earworm ever since. The prisoner’s mastery of balance yoga honors the song in every aspect except for the don’t fall down bits.

2025-10-31 Friday The gentle patter of rain dripped between random intermittent snores, waking the prisoner for a 30 minutes Hiroshima read and a 45 second Wordle. He reports that Balance Yoga was a miracle of slapstick comedy and Zwift burned enough calories to boil a thimble of water. Play date #1 was coffee with friends and for play date #2 a dog on a leash appeared with people to take the prisoner for his weekly walk. The prisoner reports feeling 9.5/10 and has no stress.

2025-10-30 Thursday The prisoner was noisily woken 30 minutes before his alarm and was in fine spirits. Succulent autumnal sunshine lazily drifted into the room and wordle put up only 22 seconds of resistance before being completed in 3 guesses. An absence of yoga for 2 weeks revealed hips that opened like the doors of a 200 year old tomb. Zwift, however was a psychological struggle to keep the HR below 90, especially when 85 year old Fraulein Kristen from Germany overtook him on Prospect Park hill. The prisoner was released for 2 hours for a birthday party play-date at a friends house. 40ml of Prosecco was uneventfully consumed.

2025-10-29 Wednesday **Wed ** The prisoner awoke in the dark, reached over and enjoyed the final 10 second countdown to his alarm. The rain clattered on the tiles and, opening his book, he settled in for a 10 minute read of a weather-appropriate Hiroshima before nailing Wordle in 4. Today’s human-experimentation was to take multiple blood pressure (BP) readings before, during & after force-feeding him the proton-pump inhibitor pill. Result: the high morning BP reading is due to it being morning. According to AI, there is no known cure for mornings.

The mysterious shoulder pain

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Healthy Athlete Had A Heart Attack Anyway 2025-10-16

TLDR Too Long; Didn’t Read;
At no stage did I ever feel that I was in severe pain and for 99.9% of this story, I felt really great. 2 days after leaving hospital, I feel even better than I've done in months despite some pretty impressive bruises and a fizzing cocktail of drugs forcing my body to adapt to some new and weird Chemistry. The medical team never used the phrase "heart attack" and so neither will I.

Stories on HaHaHaa

2026 Zwift as a recovery tool 🚲❤️‍🩹🚲

Zwift turns your garage into a home

2026 ❤️‍🩹 CResT & Physical Education

TLDRToo Long; Didn’t Read;

2026 ❤️‍🩹 Recovery Diary

TLDR Too Long; Didn’t Read;

❤️‍🩹 2025 Recovery Diary

TLDR Too Long; Didn’t Read;

The mysterious shoulder pain