Yikes!

Well it may not sound much to some of you mad cyclists out there, but in the 6ish months of this year that I've been able to ride (and since updating my stats after calculating elevation on bikehike instead of mapmyride (for only half my rides at the moment)) I have now climbed more than twice the height of Mt McKinley in Alaska and am well on my way to twice the height of Everest. Not bad going considering most of the climbing has been done AFTER my pelvic fracture and while still in pain from it!

I wonder what I could do if totally free from the pain the fracture has left me in.......

Random riding

I decided to go and do some random riding today and got on Everest, pointed her towards the hills and set off.
I wanted to see if I could complete the challenge ahead of schedule, which might explain the randomness of the ride!

I'm not going to describe the route other than to say it was very, very random, not really paying much attention to where I was going (other than to note sign posts etc) or anything. Just followed my nose and discovered once I'd plotted it on mapymyride that I'd criss-crossed pretty much everywhere.

In amongst all this randomness there were bits of normality - I nipped into Halfords for some puncture repair patches; I had to double back on Robert Sheldon Way after it was blocked by a crash with several trucks; I even managed to pop into the Job Centre to look on their job points to see if anything interesting had cropped up. Alas not!

Take a look at the route and you'll see exactly what I mean by very random!



Boring bits -
Mild (7 degrees), calm, dull and damp
Cannot update max and average speeds as left PC on kitchen cupboard!
Distance: 56.78 miles
Climbed: 2201 ft. Not surprised I was knackered when I got home!

300 mile challenge leaderboard

I've just had a look on maymyride at the Asics 300 mile challenge leader board to see how the other cyclists are doing and so far I'm leading the UK and Europe sections of it - the only countries that are ahead of me are the US, Japan and Australia; the other UK entrants are below 30% complete.

Of course you have the crazy US people who are 297% complete. I don't really comprehend why they take part in a challenge like this one when they so obviously cycle more than 300 miles in a regular week or fortnight.
For us mere mortals 300 miles is usually something that can be achieved in the summer months, but not the gloomy winter months. In my case, the closest I've got to this distance in one month is around 270 miles, and this was during the summer.

But hey ho, I'm leading the rest of the world anyway. Woohoo!!

300 mile challenge

Well, I began my 300 mile month challenge, albeit a day late as I had the first ride of the month this morning before heading to the velodromw to watch the pros in action.

I had the joys of a headwind everywhere I went, with no let up at all, so I found it a little hard, but the aim of the game is to just get out and ride the 300 miles.

See the route I took here

Boring bit -
Temperature: 8 degrees
Max speed: 31.3mph
Average speed: 13.1mph
Miles: 12.32

Hurrah!

Phew, my internet connection has been returned after it'd been lost for several days due to an 'illegal' line set up by the telephone provider - it seems that our internal lines, which ran along the floor under carpets & under door frames, was highly wrong and shouldn't have been laid that way years ago. So nice Mr BT man had to come and fit brand new lines in the correct places where they couldn't get damaged easily.

I haven't really been up to much in my time away from here as the weather hasn't really been too great. Mapmyride have a 'my goals' section that I've been looking at and have decided to have a go at. Now, cycling 300 miles in one month may either seem hard to some, or relatively easy (Amy could possibly manage that in one week) but to me it is going to be a little challenge as I've not been doing too many miles recently - usually 20 miles or less on each ride, except for the CW ride!

So, my challenge has been set. I'll be doing it in November, so have 30 days in which to ride. Rather than riding 10 miles every day, I'll be riding a minimum of half the number of days and maintaining my usual distance of 20 miles, but will do many more so long as I'm feeling good. I'll have an MCC club ride at the end of the month to help, and may ride Chorlton Wanderers' next ride - both of those combined will cover approximately 60-70 miles in total together.

I'll be putting updates on here once I get started and also on mapmyride.