Tim Corrigan blogs on cycling, trips and programming…

I leave tomorrow for my first bike trip where I’m not the organiser! It’s a week mountain biking in Morocco with Exodus – check out the trip details.

Here’s the route:

Internet connection allowing, I will be attempting to post/tweet from the trip so check back here or follow the RSS feed to keep up to date. If I’m without internet access for the whole trip, then expect some bumper posts after the 10th October!

The  following table shows  details of  my training throughout September 2010 for my Atlas Mountains trip, both planned and actual. On the whole I did well – normally doing more each session than I’d set in my (fairly conservative) plan, only tailing off in the last week when the weather was bad and I was concentrating on final preparations. I found that actually writing down a schedule did work well – as it gave me a nice target to try and beat.

This was really 4 very different rides all in one! It consisted of:

1. The advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country Park
2. From there following the Southdowns Way to the A29, just west of Amberly.
3. On the road to Burnham (from where I took a train to Havant)
4. The Hayling Billy Trail back to south Hayling Island.

Total: 39 miles – most of it offroad, and a great 6 hours training. Here is the route (terrain view gives you more of an idea):

View larger version at EveryTrail

I also used the trip to try out my new Tachyon XC Micro helmet camera for the first time. The following is my first dabbling in the world of helmet mounted video (much better efforts hopefully to come in future posts). The video is all of the advanced mountain biking course at Queen Elizabeth Country park – so gives a flavour of the riding there:

In a side note – I learned with interest recently that if you upload something to YouTube that incorporates copyright material (such as say… the music you put your biking video to) it is quite possible that it can be actively permitted to remain there by the copyright owner for various reasons… see this fascinating talk on how YouTube manages copyright material.

I just did a training ride in Windsor Great park. I reckon I did the most hill climbing you can do in 1 hour in this area without backtracking/covering the same ground twice. 11.5 miles in total – not bad for a work night with the light rapidly fading.

Since (and this isn’t always the case using the GPS) the recordings of total ascent and descent came out almost the same on this trip I think the gradient graph is broadly right – 1568ft of climbing in total. Here is the graph from Everytrail showing speed and gradient. A few blips – for example, I don’t think I got up to 50mph..

And here is the route:

View larger version at EveryTrail

I’ve just completed my first training ride in preparation for my Atlas trip. With the help of my iPhone I found a rather nice route from Hayling Island to Petersfield and back. You can’t easily avoid the busy main road off Hayling or the centre of Havant but once I’d escaped Havant it was a lovely ride – undulating but with only one really tough climb – crossing the South Downs near South Harting on the way back.

I used the ride to try out a couple of route mapping apps on my iPhone. First up Trails Lite – this was working fine – but the free version stops after 5 minutes. So on to Everytrail for the rest of the route. It worked really well – I used it both to map my route and also to frequently stop and plan my next step as I was making it up as I went along. It’s easy to use – with all the features I needed easy to find.

The only major issue was with battery life (not the fault of EveryTrail!) – my phone died 2/3 of the way through – I’d expected this issue with iPhone trip mapping – as it stands it’ll be great for mapping training rides, but isn’t going to be up to anything longer. There are possible solutions to this (there are external extra battery devices, or upgrade to iPhone 4!) but that’s for another day.

Anyway – the EveryTrail route is below. I edited it on the web after to add the missing data. As you can see I totaled 42 miles – a good start to my training…

Hayling Island to Petersfield loop

Note that you can click on the red dots to see photos I took at those points. Or go to the EveryTrail site to see a larger/interactive version.

I just took part in the most unusual (and hard) cycling event I’ve been involved with to date. I was one of 9 riding a mixture of unusual bikes and ‘normal’ bikes for 92 miles around the lake district over 24 hours… in relentless rain.

The unusual bikes consisted of 1 tandem, 1 single speed recumbent trike, 1 hand cycle and 1 trandem. The hand cycle is best described as a wheel chair with a single front wheel on a steering column with pedals instead of handlebars! The trandem is similar, but with an additional rider behind (with foot pedals). The 9 participants swapped around bikes – so it was an all over body work out for all.

All of the unusual bikes were great fun to ride – though a whole lot tougher to ride up the hills of the Lake District than a normal bike – hence why the trip was a 24 hour event! (we did have 2 hours sleep in a tent) For the serious hills like Birker Fell, Cold Fell, Matterdale End, Whinlatter Pass and Kirkstone Pass we employed various strategies to get these bikes up them. These included others helping to push and pull – both mounted on normal bikes, and for the steepest – walking.

The event was to raise money for the Bethesda project – which will be setting up an outdoor activities centre specialising in people with disabilities in Burundi, Africa. Find out more about the Bethesda Project and support it if you can.

This year I joined up with Mark Sheppard to ride the British Heart Foundation London to Brighton ride. The ride is 54 miles on road from Clapham Common to Brighton beach and this year had 27,000 official riders.

This ride gave me the motivation to get out my road bike, which has been mostly sat in the shed the last 2 years as I have been concentrating on mountain biking. I got it out a few weeks before-hand and did some training rides on it – it was like a dream to ride again – so quick! I think Mark is pretty tempted to get one for next years London to Brighton.

I’d never taken part in a ride anywhere near this big before and it was awesome seeing so many cyclists.

Tim’s London to Brighton survival tips:

• No need to carry much in the way of drink or food – there are official and unofficial stops all over the place – even people giving away biscuits!
• If you are riding a mountain bike, get some slick tyres and get your bike checked over first.
• If you’ve not ridden this kind of distance before do some training, building up to at least a 30 mile training ride. Rest the few days before though.
• Don’t try to set any time records – with so many riders, getting out of London does take some time and it only take a few riders to get off and walk up a narrow hill to force everyone to walk.
• Save something for Ditchling beacon – it’s tough but do have a go at riding it – it really is all down hill after that and it’s pretty satisying overtaking all those people walking up.

10 of us set off to ride some of national cycle route 4! Know the one? Our section followed the route of the Kennet & Avon Canal from Reading to Bath over 3 days. The starters were myself, Liz, Alison, Craig, Andy W,  Michelle, Chris, Ursula and Andrew M.

Day 1 took us from Reading to Froxfield, near Hungerford – a total of 35 miles and a lovely day of riding, despite some surprise hills on the road section towards the end. We rounded up the evening playing quick scrabble and drinking Belgian beer.

Day 2 had Tim B join us with the national cycle route taking us off the towpath for 27 miles of road to Devizes. It might have been possible to ride the towpath for this section (as two girls on folding bikes were doing) but with a group this large we stuck to the designated route. The evening brought huge quantities of curry (and prawn cocktail and chips for Craig!), plenty of beer and killer pool in the local version of “Reflex”. There were some quite hilly sections, especially that one towards the end – but all coped very well – have you all been out secretly training or something?

Day 3 had us back on the towpath for 22 nice flat miles, a stop for some big cakes and an eventual race (for some reason) into Bath city centre led by Liz including overtaking the local cyclists and fending off the double decker tourist bus!

Nick names for the trip: Tim C: Maintenance Man, Liz: My Pet My Responsibility, Alison H: Queen of the Hills (again!), Tim B: Tight Chain, Craig: Prawn Cocktail, Andy W: Where is my food?,  Michelle: Pool Queen, Chris: Egg, Ursula: More Tea!, Andrew M: Marathon Crossover and Alison S: Team Z (drove to meet us at the pub!).

A great trip –  and importantly one in which everyone who started finished, and not only that finished together and with a smile on their face. Well done everyone!

Today Liz, Dylan and I set off on a bike trip that was rather flatter than my usual. One that took in most of Hayling Island’s south beach and most of Southsea beach as well. Family bike rides may be lacking in the speed and exhilaration of fast road riding or sweeping singletrack but that doesn’t mean they have to be dull. 

This ride had day long sea views, countless opportunities for ice cream and snack breaks, a brief spell of riding along a 15th century fortification, us crossing the path of the worlds longest running commercial hovercraft and even some clambering around a kiddies pirate ship. But the highlight for me was taking the bikes on the Hayling Ferry over to Eastney. There is something great about combining these two modes of transport – in this case not least because the total time to Southsea was less than it would have been to drive, but also – well it just looks cool having your bike on a ferry!

Next time – perhaps we’ll go a stage further and take the next ferry over to Gosport as well!

Rob and I set out for a bit of early year training on my favourite training ride in Queen Elizabeth Country Park, near Petersfield. The park itself has 2 waymarked mountain biking routes, novice and advanced. It is also right on the South Downs Way so I find an excellent 2 hour training route can be made out of riding out and back along the Way for an hour and finishing up with riding the advanced course in the park.

The novice course begins with a gravel track quickly followed by all the climbing for the route in one go. The descent is then on wide tracks with some brief spots of singletrack. The advanced course however has much more variety with climbing sections, singletrack sections and a technical downhill switchback section. My favourite part of it though is the last section which is of the flowing downhill singletrack variety. 

In terms of effort I find the novice course almost as tough as the advanced one with the advanced one being a lot more fun so I invariably plump for advanced. Anyway, despite it being only a few degrees above 0, it was a beautiful day and got me inspired to get out there more often in the coming months.