The End of the Epic Bike Ride

I made it to the end. The last few days involved battling miserable weather between Lincolnshire and London, struggling with...well...London, and finally making it down to the coast. In the process, I managed to take a caterpillar 60km - no idea how, he just crawled onto me in a bus stop and I only noticed him when he crawled up my neck in Peterborough. London, as usual, was the source of much heart-ache for me. 

I stayed with my brother and sister-in-law-to-be, who graciously offered up their couch. However, London's bumpy roads managed to pull my bike rack off twice - something that hadn't happened previously on the trip - and getting lost trying to find my way out did little to improve my antipathy towards the city. I've discovered that the only Londoners willing to speak to a stranger aren't Londoners at all, since the only ones who gave me directions were northern or foreign. Londoners, it would seem, have two responses to "google maps has got me lost; how do I get out of this city in the direction of Brighton" - "Brighton's far," and "oh, you'll never get there." Thanks, that's really helpful. 

Brighton, on the other hand, is easy to navigate and has friendly locals; the only possible hindrance is the proliferation of what my aunt calls "bastard hills". The last thirty-odd kilometres on the A23 is enormous hill after enormous hill, peppered with road works for added challenge. So much so, I had to stop and eat the last of the plumpy nut bars (not their official name, but they taste reassuringly like Plumpy Nut, the fortified peanut goo that UNICEF gives to malnutrite babies) that Mum had sent me just to get over them.

I'll write about Goodwood later, because that's a piece for another website. Have a great week, everyone!

Bike Ride of Epicness - Day Eight

I have now made it as far as Louth. Yesterday was an easy day in terms of distance - 90-odd kilometres - but I still managed to get hopelessly lost. Google Maps tends to send me by the wiggliest-windiest route, and none of the roads it suggests are signposted in a helpful way, for example "Louth - Right - 10 miles." Most of them don't have signposts at all, so I've got pretty good at getting directions. For future reference, people under the age of thirty are useless for directions, as are old ladies. Winner of the day was a farmer - slim, older man with an Einstein hairstyle - who stopped his tractor to chat to me as I stood on the side of the road looking confused. His directions were "follow me; the field I'm going to plough is just before the road you want." Towards the end of the day, I had found a farm road that looked like it went nowhere - but had been reassured that it went through to an A-road - and sat down for a cry. The sun was going down, there was no mobile signal, I'd almost run out of water, and I was tuckered out. A guy rode up - turns out he was a beat cop from Grimsby who was out testing his new road bike, and a very nice bike it was too - gave me a 150mL Coke and refilled my water bottle from his spare. He then rode with me to the nearest town with signal to call for assistance. 'Twas a good day after all. Today's mission is to get to Harlow - about 200km. No getting lost today!

P.S. Blogger seems to think I live in Hawaii. It's 6:20 a.m., not 10:20 p.m.

Bike Ride of Epicness - Day Six

Day six and a rest break. I'm at a friend's house, and what a luxury it is to have a bed and a bathroom with a door! I did 150kms yesterday; I was scheduled to do 100, but Google Maps was vague about which left I should take. Needless to say, I took the scenic route down the A19, around the York ring road, and then left to Hull. I did try find a shorter route, but the consensus was that the A19 would be best. This morning, I'm struggling to stand. 

Beans, beans, good for your heart,

The more you eat, the more you fart;

The more you fart, the better you feel.

Beans, beans at every meal.

A few observations:

I know James Hunt thought Marlboros were the breakfast of champions, but he didn't know about the turbo-charging properties of baked beans. Seriously, I think NASA JPL should look into this.

People turn into complete morons when they have a car-full of kids. The ring road around York was torture with people jostling for position, cutting people off, not paying attention to cyclists, etc.

150kms is too far for one day. I'm very glad I had scheduled today off!

BIke Ride of Epicness - Day 4

Another quick update.

I crashed (as in, got too tired to carry on) at 70kms on Wednesday. Thursday dawned with a blustery gale - between 15 and 25km/h wind - which I pushed against as hard as I could. At around the 45km mark, I almost got blown under an eighteen-wheel truck. I decided at that point that it would be more sensible to pull off, so found a farm that didn't mind randoms camping. They let me pitch in the forest by their fowl lake (from the colour of the water, 'foul' would also work in that sentence as a descriptor for 'lake', but it didn't stink), which was nicely sheltered from the wind. I took photos; I'll upload them soon.

As an aside, if you're ever driving up the A1 to Edinburgh, stop at the Cook and Barker pub in Newton-on-the-Moor. It's a lovely, lovely place. Best service and nicest chips so far this side of the border.

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Day 2 - Bike Ride of Epicness

Mini-post, because of time constraints.

Wow, there are so few places in small towns that have wifi! I thought there would be one or two places per day to stop and rest that would have wifi...apparently I was mistaken. The first day was lovely until the last fifteen kilometres. I got hopelessly lost, so didn't get to see Duns - there was a Jim Clarke museum I wanted to explore. As a result, I ended up 15km north of where I needed to stop yesterday, so I started today lost and behind. I'm currently 30km south of Berwick-Upon-Tweed and am going to push another 15kms or so. Will update properly when I next get wifi. Have taken photos, so will share those in due course

Four Days to D-Day

I'm terrified. One of the highlights of my day is dragging my exhausted body to bed, curling up on the thick, squishy mattress, and wrapping the bulky duvet around me. On the road, I'm going to be pitching a tent, rolling out a thin foam mattress, and crawling into a sleeping bag. One of the points of riding was to spend less than the £150 it would have cost me to get there by train; I can't get my budget to work out if I sleep in hotel rooms. 

In old-school adventures, the discomfort of sleeping on the floor is glossed over. However, I've been camping enough times to know that hips and lower backs don't take well to sleeping on hard surfaces. I've also camped in the UK enough times to know that it's always cold. Even in mid-summer, it rains, blows a gale, and freezes the backside off any camper foolhardy enough to venture outside. 

I'm hoping that, by using hiking tricks - changing out of the sweaty clothes as soon as I stop, adding dry layers as my body cools down, and using a sleeping bag liner - I can avoid hypothermia. I'm not sure how to avoid the constant body-ache, but I'm packing heat lotion to try counter-act it. Oh, and a daily stretching routine to work the kinks and aches out of my muscles. I'm going to look ridiculous: wearing a dress while riding a bicycle, and stopping to pitch a tent and do a full round of stretches. But as Steve Jobs once said, "stay hungry, stay foolish." This trip is probably the height of foolishness, but I'm hungry for what I'll learn.

Lessons on a Bike - Training Part 3

This ride is starting to take on a life of its own. It's doing things to me, changing me, in ways I had not anticipated. It's as if I'm paying my spiritual taxes in blood, sweat, and tears. Yes, I do mean 'blood' and 'tears' literally - it's been painful learning lessons like how high of a pavement edge I can ride off sideways, and which bushes are pricklier than they look. However, I haven't had the disposable income to be as generous as I've wanted this year, so I willingly make the sacrifice now.

Despite the pain, it's enjoyable. Not all of it is physically pleasurable, but I like the thought that I will have achieved something of significance by year's end. For too long, I've been stuck on a hamster wheel of simply earning money - it's a basic survival thing, I'll grant you, but I don't want my life to slip away unmarked to an unremarkable end. When I die, I want the officiant at my funeral to have a full life of subject matter to draw from in the ceremony, not a nondescript "she was nice enough."

Just for the record, no, I'm not planning to die soon. The contemplation of my legacy started after the murder of a friend when I was eighteen; that was the first time I realised I had to do something with my life if I wanted a funeral with interesting stories. The quest has been on-going since, but I haven't yet reached the point where I feel I have nothing left to do. Given that "go ice-diving on Neptune" is on my bucket list, I don't anticipate ever feeling that way. But training my physical body and finding its natural rhythm is focussing my mind on the task of amassing a body of meaningful work.

I'm almost tempted to get a cape and wear it during the ride. Much of my reading of late has been Tolkien-centric, Tolkien's characters set out on long adventures wearing capes. They carry provisions - something I'm going to do on the bike - and set out, ill-prepared except for a cape that protects them from wind, rain, and cold. Also, it's after The Year Two Thousand (remember when we all called it that?), and people after The Year Two Thousand were supposed to wear capes. Alas, I fear it would be impractical on a bicycle, but would add to the feeling of being on an adventure. Even if I don't reach my fundraising target, I'd just like to get there and back again, bonus points for having someone else's Postsecret wish (pictured alongside) come true for me too.


With that in mind, I'll leave you now to go back to transcribing a first draft. The transcription needs to be finished by the time I leave, so it can rest while I'm on the road. When I get back, I'll have the second draft to work on, and the first six months of this year will not have been wasted effort.

Lessons on a Bike - Training for the Epic Bike Ride Part 2

I didn't cycle the 200kms I had planned to do last week. I could pretend it was because of some major life event, but it wasn't; a few small things brought me down - a puncture that was beyond my skill level, a flooded kitchen, writing a risk avoidance strategy for the trip (my grandmother has major concerns about me riding so far on my own), and suchlike. In the end, I only managed about 120kms. 

I say 'about' because I got lost a few times. Google Maps tells me how far my planned route is; it doesn't calculate how far one has travelled down the wrong path before realising that it wasn't where one wanted to be. My brother assures me that if I had an iPhone, I could have an app that calculates my route distance, and speed, and time splits for each kilometre. Alas, I live in the technological Dark Ages, and the most useful thing my phone can do is unlock my bike (I attached a lanyard to it; my bike key is attached so I don't lose it).

Those [approximately] 120kms were a useful training exercise, however, so I don't feel too bad about not meeting my target. I've learned a few more things about life with a bicycle, the first being that you can pump a tyre up too hard - one should stop before the valve detaches itself from the inner tube. The second is that there are two kinds of people in the world that literally do not care where they stand or who might want to use that piece of real estate for travel - people with prams, and people catching taxis. If you cycle for more than three hours in a day, you will be hungry no matter how much you eat. Also, Rosslyn Chapel is beautiful, and the glenn (that's a valley with a forest and a river; if it was just a valley, it would be 'glen') next to it is enchanting. 

The last thing I learned this week is that I need a shopping list. The shopping list goes as follows:

- an iPhone (or other suitable smartphone with Google Maps and the bike workout app my brother uses)

- a decent camera (bonus points for good quality video recording capability)

- a sewing machine (have you any idea how hard it is to find '50s fashion in stores?)

- a co-rider or travel buddy for the trip (as much for my grandmother's peace of mind as it is to stave off the loneliness of the road)

- a superpower, preferably mind-control, but I would settle for super-speed or super-strength

(And as always, if you would like to sponsor me, click here to donate to Care International. It will be much appreciated)

The Bike Ride - Starting Training

I have learned the meaning of a euphemism this week: "you're looking well" = "have you lost weight?" It surprised me how many people said that to me this weekend. I've started training for an epic charity bike ride, and have been doing seventy-five kilometres per week to ease into it (that increases to two hundred this coming week). The four kilograms that evaporated since my last visit to the nurse simply escaped my notice.

I should probably point out that before the start of this year the last time I rode a bicycle was more than a decade ago. I used to ride home from school every day to save petrol, but stopped after a taxi knocked me down. After developing an irrational fear of other road users - something I only partly overcame when I learned to drive - I embraced the sedentary lifestyle and ignored anything that could hurt me.

In January of this year, I met up with an ex lecturer who spends his retirement going on cycling holidays and suggested we ride out to see the Falkirk Wheel. We didn't end up cycling there; we took the train to Falkirk and then rode from the station to the Wheel. It was still an enjoyable day out, so I started to go for the occasional afternoon ride along the Union Canal, only about twenty kilometres each and spending as little time on roads as possible.

Then I committed to doing the Bike Ride of Epicness (click here for the route) for Care International, which requires me to cover between sixty and eighty kilometres per day. Another confession: when I rode home from school, I wasn't a very fast rider; the ten kilometre trip averaged forty-five minutes. While fourteen kilometres per hour is an easy pace in terms of calorie burn, Google Maps thinks each day's ride will take about five hours if I ride at my old speed. Riding around town - yes, I've conquered my fear of being run over enough to ride the streets of Edinburgh - I've been averaging twenty kilometres per hour, including time slowing for traffic lights and people pushing baby-chicanes (you know those three- or four-wheeled things that take up most of the cycle path and house a tiny human along with all its paraphernalia) along cycle paths. Thankfully, bike routes have an unspoken hierarchy: give to faster traffic. I'll report back next week with a progress update...hopefully, I won't have sacrificed the speed for the increased distance.