So this was a strange one. Overall, I felt very good and I was going at a very good pace. In fact, I was going the fastest ever for such a distance (18.4 Km/h). Yet – I think I flopped it and arrived 15 minutes after the very last deadline. Pathetic, right? It’s all to do, of course, in me taking BREAKS and LOOOOOONG ones too!
Some of the breaks I can, sort of, excuse. One has to stop for bare necessities, be it putting organic material and liquid into the body and allowing the remains of the above leave the body in peace. Well, one can make a dance and a song of every such occasion but I don’t think I did…
I did stop for other reasons. For example, I must have spent at least 20 minutes trying to sort out a very faint noise from my front wheel. For some reason I get totally incest by the slightest noise from my bike. Anything that merely HINTS at one part rubbing unnecessarily against another is driving me spares. I know it’s not rational, but in my mind I see how the bike is falling into total disrepair and disintegrates any minute now. So I must sort it out – right? Well, I didn’t and at the end I just had to continue as is.
The noise was, as I said, faint to start with, but then it became occasional and finally I don’t think it was on at all – so – I don’t know.
I got up really early, like 05:45, trying to do the vast majority of the way during light time and not get back in the dark. You can appreciate that I failed there too 🙂
Last time I decided that I am using too busy roads on my way back and decided to find an alternative route, which should also, as an added bonus, spare me the ‘massive’ Maswell Hill towards the end. I certainly managed to avoid the latter with my new route, but the roads I have chosen were even busier that my previous week! Well, perhaps not OBJECTIVELY busier, but as they were rural and isolated and narrow (that’s how I have chosen them), the speeding cars that zoomed by in abundance left me feeling very uncomfortable and unsafe. I think I’ll go back to my previous routes. They may have been busier – but the road ALLOWED for it so it was not so scary.
I also managed to lose TWO water bottles – both in the same irritating way. The first one I lost on the very big descend towards Eylesbury. Trouble was, the road was in an appalling condition and my bike was jumping up and down like a rodeo machine. In one of the huge jumps my water bottle dislodged itself and got knocked against the pavement with such a force that it split open. I stopped (with great difficulty) climbed back and drank from it whatever I could – and left it there.
The second incident was very similar: Nice descent with highly irritating and strategically placed bumps. They were small and you had to REALLY slow to avoid being catapulted to the sky. I didn’t. So my next bottle has gone the same way as the first. I drank as much as I could and vowed to PAY ATTENTION on such roads.
Finally – I managed to get my Cadence to be approaching the golden 60. OK 57 is not quite there yet, but compared to the 51 and 53 this is pretty cool. I now manage to get even 66 and 67 during my commuting journeys, so I am quite sure I’ll do better next time. And next time means THIS Saturday.
I checked again what would it take for me to do the LEL and after considerable effort and working out distances times and permutations to those elements I ended up with a 14 hours deficit. That’s not good at all, and unless I can recover from a 300 Km journey in 4 hours or so I don’t see how I can make it. The whole thing looks plainly unachievable for me. I need to do an average of 20Km/h while riding and take no more than 30 minutes for each 100 Km in breaks – so if I manage 200 Km in 11 hours – then I would probably be OK. I am nowhere near it.
The certificate:
