eAndrews

Training in the snow

simon — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:06:23 +0000

This weekend (Easter) has had the strangest weather. Normally Easter is associated with spring and nice cool sunny days, but not this weekend! I went out on two training rides, one on Friday (here) and one on Monday (here). Both days I had to contend with hail stones, which kill on cold bare legs, and strong head winds. On Monday I even had the pleasure of cycling in snow, which fortunately didn’t settle.

Both days I was using my Forerunner to display a virtual partner, basically it allows you to race against a previous course that you have done and it tells you how far behind/ahead you are relative to the virtual partner. Naturally I want to beat my previous times, on Friday I was hampered by strong head winds and at one point I slipped to 0.75 miles behind the virtual partner. I managed to turn this around and finished only 29 feet behind! Monday was a different matter altogether. I was behind for the first 16 miles of the ride, then I decided to push harder an I managed to get to 1.25 miles ahead. Then disaster struck, I had my first puncture in over 3000 miles. It took me the equivalent of 5 miles cycling to fix it. By the time I was back in the saddle I was 4 miles behind, there was no way I was going to be able to make that up! I’ll just have to try it again next week, after I’ve replaced the back tyre.

Hopefully Wales will be warmer and kinder on the tyres…

Is there any hope?

simon — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:03:44 +0000

I’ve just been looking around on the Internet for references to Lon Las and I cam across this site on Just Giving.

http://www.justgiving.com/lonlas-stopthetraffik

The rider in question was going to cycle the Lon Las in 3 days, like us. He also says that he will update his blog during his training and during the ride itself. I eagerly went over to his blog to read how he got on, only to find that there are no entries about the ride! Did he make it? Did he even start?

If anyone has information on Tim Lyttle then let me know!

Lon Las Ride - The Full Route

simon — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 08:45:50 +0000

Ok, I thought day one of the Lon Las was a toughie! It looks like day 2 will be the real killer with two climbs of about 500?metres (that’s over 1600ft for you imperial fans out there). Those two climbs combined are higher than England’s highest peak, Scafell Pike, which at a mear 978?metres (3,209 feet)!

The 2nd and 3rd days are both about 70 & 77?miles respectively?(I forgot to note down the actual distances). Day 3 is probably not completely accurate, it follows the Taff Trail which isn’t detailed on my Mapsource software.

The full route is here: Lon Las Route, you’ll need Google Earth to view it.

?And to highlight the madness of the ride, here are all three days profiles (click on the images to enlarge):

Day 1 profile:	Day 2 profile:

Day 3 profile:

Lon Las Ride - Day 1

simon — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:25:23 +0000

Well, it’s at moments like this that you realise how stupid you’ve been saying you can ride from Holyhead to Cardiff (known as Lon Las) in three days. It seemed like a good idea at the time, trying to minimize the amount of time needed off work, etc..

I’ve now put the first days route into Mapsource and have the distance and the route profile for the first day. It doesn’t look good.

The route is 95miles (we can shorten this by about 12 miles by not taking the silly route down to Criccieth, it must be a nice place for such a diversion!), but the real killer is the route profile, there is quite a kick towards the end of the day!

If you’re interested, you can view the first days route in Google Earth:

Holyhead to Dolgellau

I’m looking forward to plotting the next two days to see what Wales has in store for us!