March started with that work visit to New Delhi for a Hearing. The hotel had a pool and allegedly a fitness centre; the former I didn’t really get to use because we ended up working well over 70 hours that week, including the weekend, and the latter was better than it looked on their website. The treadmill also linked properly to my Apple Watch Ultra and launched an Apple Fitness+ run which appeared to show video on the main screen and the photos that were mentioned came up on the Watch. I only managed to get it to work like this once, though.
But that was only short term as we were off to Fuerteventura for a combination of remote working and holiday: I’d already booked a villa for a week but still had two days’ holiday to take and had looked at the cost of a city break before deciding that I could move our Business Class flights a week earlier and book another week (albeit in a different villa in the same complex) for less. So I also amended my bike hire with Easy Riders Bike Centre in Corralejo to ensure I could do some road riding whilst I was there … and that I did: something like 324km on their Specialized Allez Elite.
Here are March’s stats:
March 2025 Statistics
Activities: 36 Distance: 503.97 km Time: 28:49:39 Calories: 25,850
Turning to my weight, at the end of February I weighed 87.4kg and at the end of March I weighed 86.1kg, which is down by 1.3kg. Body fat percentage was down from 25.0% to 22.6% which I think was a minor blip.
February started with some new work coming onto the horizon that was soon confirmed with a week’s visit to New Delhi for a Hearing. The hotel had a pool and allegedly a fitness centre; the former I didn’t really get to use because we ended up working well over 70 hours that week, including the weekend, and the latter was better than it looked on their website. The treadmill also linked properly to my Apple Watch Ultra and launched an Apple Fitness+ run which appeared to show video on the main screen and the photos that were mentioned came up on the Watch. I only managed to get it to work like this once, though.
In the Pain Cave it was a combination of running on the treadmill with JRNY adaptive workouts, and FulGaz, with a continuation and eventual completion of their Grand Tour 2025, as well as my usual John Hallas’ Weekly Challenges.
And there was the good news that ROUVY had decided to keep FulGaz going as a standalone app, providing they could maintain the user base at its current level. Fingers crossed!
Here are February’s stats:
February 2025 Statistics
Activities: 22 Distance: 401.09 km Time: 16:08:36 Calories: 17,545
Turning to my weight, at the end of January I weighed 86.8kg and at the end of February I weighed 87.4kg, which is up by 0.6kg, sadly. Body fat percentage was down from 25.5% to 25.0% though.
Back on it in January with my usual spike in weight whilst trying to cope with shorter, darker, drearier days and more work, work, work with deadlines to hit.
So it was back to a combination of running on the treadmill with JRNY adaptive workouts, and FulGaz, where they opened up their Grand Tour 2025 on January 11th, as well as my usual John Hallas’ Weekly Challenges.
And there was the bad news – that originally I marked as spam – that FulGaz had now been acquired by ROUVY, an inferior app. This was following FulGaz’s earlier acquisition by the Ironman group who then decided they didn’t want to continue with FulGaz and slashed and burned them; the story of the disposal and sale to ROUVY is appalling, as detailed over on DC Rainmaker’s blog entry:
I’ve been too busy with the Grand Tour to give ROUVY a try or even see if the Schwinn will connect to it, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s not going to be a happy transition from FulGaz to ROUVY when the time comes and they stop supporting the FulGaz app. ROUVY seems to be the worst of both worlds: some “Augmented Reality” in the way of rider avatars like Zwift coupled with lower resolution real life videos, some of which appear to have been filmed from cars, rather than from an actual bike rider.
We shall see.
Here are January’s stats (obviously assisted with fact that there are well over 90 days in January each year…):
January 2025 Statistics
Activities: 32 Distance: 485.69 km Time: 22:40:57 Calories: 22,814
Turning to my weight, at the end of December I weighed 88.1kg and at the end of January I weighed 86.8kg, which is down by 1.3kg! Body fat percentage was up from 25.2% to 25.5% which is weird.
I’m hoping that some of the issues I’ve been seeing with the Connected app may be due to overheating of my iPhone 15 Pro in the charging cubbyhole because of wireless charging couple with the app’s insistence that it has to be unlocked and open on the app for it to work…
I say I’m hoping, because allegedly the iPhone 16 Pro should have better thermal properties. We’ll see.
More ridiculous behaviour from the BMW Motorrad Connected [sic] app in the meantime, though: I’ve upgraded my iPhone 15 Pro to a 16 Pro last month so I needed to transfer the apps and data over.
To make an informed decision on which capacity I went for, it’s good to check how much storage I’m using and the iPhone told me I’m using a shedload of storage for the BMW app. Not surprising, given I needed UK, Spain, France, German, Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium maps for my recent trips.
So a quick look at the app and it tells me there were 16 updates available for some 44GB.
And there’s no way to delete the stored maps unless I download the updates and then delete them afterwards!
We’ve recently celebrated eight years of ownership with another dealer service and MoT, this time with Stellantis & You at Guildford as it’s a short drive from where we now live.
And it passed with no problem at 40,374 miles, up 5,451 miles on last year.
I expect the mileage will go down even more now, as we’ve bought a Ford Focus ST Estate for the longer drives where we need to carry stuff and/or other people.
September 2024 saw the end of the holiday theme starting with a few days in Prague and ending with a weird week in Corralejo. Weird? Well the last time we were there it was as residents moving back to the UK full time and this time we were back as bloody tourists staying once more at Bahiazul.
The complex contains the ‘main’ Bahiazul operated villas but also others we’ve used before: Villas Veaco and KATIS Villas. The upside of booking with Bahiazul is two-fold:
Breakfast in their restaurant is included so that sets you up nicely for the day; and
You have access to the gym which is relatively good, though not as good as our Pain Cave.
As far as I was concerned, I could simply run or walk but my knees and post-crash issues make that uncomfortable to say the least, plus I wanted to ride a bike anyway. This meant hiring a mountain bike from Easy Riders which was a painless experience and recommended. As I knew I’d be heading out on the roads past the dunes, I needed to wear a bike helmet and didn’t fancy hiring one, so I bought an alpinestars Vector Pro Atom helmet and some needlessly flash Galibier Campionissimo Luxury gloves. Both were excellent.
The hire bike – a Trek Marlin 7 – had two issues for me:
The gearing was great for climbs and no doubt spot-on for off-road riding, but on the road I was unable to pedal quicker than 31km/h due to the low gearing (104rpm cadence). My fault for choosing an MTB but the road surfaces can be a tad iffy out there.
The seat post kept descending due to my weight and the bumps, so I was needing to stop to heave it back up again because I didn’t have the necessary Allen key.
Lesson learned and next time I may hire a road bike or choose one with a larger front sprocket.
Anyway, here are September’s stats:
September 2024 Stats
Activities: 41 Distance: 406.47 km Time: 31:12:40 Calories: 20,118
Turning to my weight, at the end of August I weighed 85.4kg and at the end of August I weighed 87.1kg, which is up 1.7kg. Too many good breakfasts and restaurant dinners!
August 2024 continued the holiday theme following my son, Jack’s wedding before heading off to Venice for a few days at the Hilton Molino Stucky and ending with a few days in Prague at probably the best hotel we’ve ever stayed at, the Mandarin Oriental.
Hitting the gym at these luxury hotels was difficult so we also went walkabout a lot – Alison is going to compete in 2025 in the Masters’ Bikini Class, so needs to bang in many thousands of steps every day along with her workouts.
So here are August’s stats:
August 2024 Stats
Activities: 22 Distance: 288.87 km Time: 21:34:09 Calories: 14,161
Turning to my weight, at the end of July I weighed 84.7kg and at the end of August I weighed 85.4kg, which is up 0.7kg.
After breakfast, we set off and after a few hours on the fabulous N-260 road, we were still 3 hours away from the night’s stop. Sadly the cafe we stopped at wasn’t serving food due to a staffing problem, so it was just a Coke and a water for now (plus one of Alison’s Rice Krispies bars).
RT roadside in Boltaña
Then it was on to our next Parador, the Parador de La Seu d’Urgell with the mileage now up to 637km so far having enjoyed all the sweeping bends of the N-260 today.
Secure parking for your motorbike is always a bonus, so I was pleased they even had a special shed for motorbikes too, which is nice. Luckily they don’t do Aperol Spritzes either…
The food was good, but not as good as the night before, sadly.
Day 2 dawned bright and early as we had to be up and out of our cabin a half hour before docking into Santander at 8.00am and we wanted breakfast before as well.
I had already planned a route and imported it into the pitiful BMW Connected app and set it to “Winding”. That setting gives you three options: “Min:, “Max” and a middle setting. and I assume – because there’s no help file – that Min means it’s not too windy and max means it’s going to take you all round Will’s mother’s.
So off we went. And yes, it decided that what we really wanted to do on an RT touring bike on road tyres, two-up with luggage was to use gravel tracks… And that was when it was actually keeping Connected. I think BMW Motorrad are taking the piss calling it that, because for any navigation you have to use their app. To do so, you have to pair the phone to your bike – woe betide you if you want to use your phone with your intercom on any other bike, because the bike has to be the intermediary and you have to unpair your phone and intercom.
Once you’ve connected via Bluetooth and planned your route, you tell the app to navigate and then you have to set up an additional wireless connection to the RT just to see the maps.
So far, so good(!), but at a random – or many random – points on your journey, that wireless connection will drop out and to top it off the Bluetooth connection might also randomly drop out, leaving you to have to stop by the side of the road, open the storage compartment, re-establish the connection – which may or may not mean restarting the RT – and then get going again.
Later on, the RT decided it might just reboot itself completely, leaving you with a blank screen without any speed information, let alone any navigation.
It is utterly pants. It’s not even like the navigation system properly displays POIs or warns you of safety cameras, for instance. Indeed, at the start of Day 3, I was very low on fuel and the Connected (cr)app was telling me the nearest petrol station was 87km away when there was actually one showing on Google Maps and Apple Maps 3/4km away. But you can’t use those apps on the RT because BMW are too stupid to get CarPlay working on their bikes, whilst it’s working on their cars. It Connected or nothing!
Anyway, whinge over, we set off and then rerouted manually to at least see some scenic roads and stops for coffee along the way to our first night’s hotel, the Parador de Sos del Rey Católico.
Now I’d first heard of Paradores on the wonderful Harry’s Garage YouTube channel from some of his road trip videos and unknown to me to start with, this particular Parador was featured in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’t excellent series, The Trip to Spain.
View from the terrace at the Parador de Sos del Rey Católico
Parador de Sos del Rey Católico Room
After a shower and a freshen-up – it had been quite a warm ride with us seeing 37°C at one point – we decided that wine and generous gins on an empty stomach would help help…
Before dinner, we headed off into Sos del Rey Católico itself for a little exercise despite it still being pretty bloody hot. The place is very hilly but very picturesque.
And then dinner: local food cooked to a very high standard. Very much recommended.
And finally, a little bit of footage from on the bike:
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