Decided to do something a bit different on Saturday and joined in a group bike ride organised by YACF. The route was a circular one starting and finishing at Cromford (handy for the remaining railway, and not too far a bike ride from Nottingham or Derby). As is my wont I decided to cycle over, and made good time thanks to joining up with a couple of fast roadies in Ripley and having a group effort along the A6.

The route sets off along the A6 before a little bridlewaying onto the trackbed. Then the Monsal Trail is followed through a serious of impressive tunnels and over some high viaducts to Chee Dale. Here there’s a climb up to the High Peak trail which leads back to the start. The tunnels are quite long, and while they have basic electric lighting a good front light will make things more pleasant.

As it follows an old railway line, and then an old cartway the route is pretty flat. Though there is a pretty hilly bit that joins the two together. To get back to Cromford I decided to shoot down Wirksworth hill from Middleton Top which is good fun (43mph until I got stuck behing a slow car), though there is also an off road route down which bring you back to Cromford Canal for an off road route back to the start. Though this descent is quite steep and has some nasty drainage ditches which may catch the unwary.

The surfaces of the trails are pretty firm. I did this on a road bike with almost slick 25mm tyres without any problems. Though if it’s wet it may be a little slippy in places. The trails are shared with walkers and equestrians, so please be careful and considerate.

Our ride around took about 6.5 hours for ~40 miles, but that included a long lunch at the Royal Oak, cake stops, loitering for photos and stops to regroup.

The route below may jump about a bit as I’d set the Garmin to Smart logging rather than my normal 1 second rate, and it looks like it’s cut some corners in places. (It also means I’ve worked out how to get a gpx plotted onto an Ordnance Survey map :)).

Well, that was a great day out. Set off on the first 50k leg of my ECE to Alfreton at 6:30, 5 minutes later I stopped to put on full finger gloves for the first time at this end of the year. It did was me up nicely though after a late night back from Birmingham after attending a Tony Harrison poetry reading. It was a bit nippy, but the sunlight was creeping through as I left Nottingham and the descent down Spring lane to Lambley had a lovely pink hue and mist hanging around in the fields. An uninspiring blast along the A612 to Thurgarton and back got the first control point. And then coming up through Calverton, Ravenshead and Kirkby-in-Ashfield saw me getting to Alfreton about for about 8:30. Just about right to get a bit of a rest and some tea in before the official off at 9. Should have gone to find a decent breakfast, but hey ho it was only 40km to Eyam.

About 70 riders set off on this one. Didn’t see any recumbent or fixed wheel riders, so the serious audaxers must have been off playing somewhere else :). Had to fight the urge to turn right at the bottom of the hill as most of the Alfreton routes do, but was nice not to be dicing with idiot overtakers in cars. A semi pace line seemed to form up, but wasn’t quite at the right pace for me so I moved up a bit. Leapfrogged with a couple of groups till I fell in with 2 other riders who’s pace suited me.

This was the only section where my gpx departed from the routesheet (no real shortcut, though I did add a nice gratuitous short scroggy climb). It would appear that when I cleaned it up a bit I removed a couple of waypoints and MapSource went for what it thought was a better route.

Luckily one of the riders I fell in with had done the ride before (as the Biggin Hilly and Roy Carradine Memorial) so I followed a wheel for a bit. Was suprised to get to Eyam pretty near the head of the field (looks like the fast club boys were at the same event as the audaxers), which was actually quite useful. The Tea Rooms were being refurbished and under new management who’d arranged to open especially for us. Once the main body of riders turned it started getting a bit hectic. I’d really been feeling the effects of 100km without food, and the wheels had almost come off big style on the climb up New Road off of the B6521, so I had a decent portion of Beans on Toast with the traditional Fried egg. My previous riding companions had left by then, and the bulge had arrived so I decided to get out of the way.

Suitably refreshed I head up out of Eyam. Good long descent down past Monsal Head, though with a suspicous head on I did wonder if I’d missed a routesheet instruction as it felt a little too long. This was soon corrected after Ashford in the Water as we started the long climb up to Monyash, tempted to stop for a breather at the Smithy but kept on going. Got worried at where I thought the first info control should be, but it just turned out that the building by a TL@X was actually a fair distance from the X. Another good long swoop down a valley and a short climb up the other side and the control at Biggin appeared. Luckily the first couple of riders had warmed up the service (they’d waited 50 minutes, I waited 10), normally wouldn’t stop for another full meal but was still feeling a bit rough so had a large sandwich with chips.

Started winding up for the climb out of Parwich up to Via Gellia. The sun came out about now, so I rolled down the arm warmers and got into a good rythym. This was a great climb to enjoy, steep enough to be an effort, but not so steep that there wasn’t a good rhythym to be found, and pleasant scenery to enjoy as well. Then came the fun of shooting down Via Gellia. Don’t know if there was a headwind but I didn’t seem to get the usual speed going down, needed quite a bit of pedal pushing to keep >20mph. Straight through Cromford and the final climb of the day up through Lea and Holloway up to the Tram museum and Monument. Then some slight undulations back to Alfreton and it was all done. 5:09 in the end, with about an hour lounging around eating.

Rode home by reversing the morning’s route. Ended up with 212km with 2600m climb in 10:41, pretty happy with that. Especially as I seem to have enter 9AAA points worth of rides for 2012 already (and that’s just The Dean and Yr Elenydd (Elenith)). Think I’ll be putting this gpx away as a little DIY training loop.

The ECE part of the ride was nice and painless as well. The ECE org was nice and helpful, and I’ve already had the ECE parts certified. This is going to come in handy if I want to keep up the distances, but not end up traipsing across the country in the car or via public transport (unfortunately it’s work rather than willingness that stops me thinking about cycling to distant events).

Bit of a treat this month as I actually get to ride a calendar event, Company on a ride, not had that since the 600 back in July!!

The route looks like a nice ‘scenic’-ish tour of the Peak District (uTrack gives me ~1800m climbing), though none of it looks too horrible).  And the current weather forecast is looking like it’ll mostly be dry and maybe a little bit of sun will poke through the clouds as well.

As I need a 200km ride in October for RRTY I’ll be ECEing the ride with 50km before and after. Nothing exciting, just a main road bash to a small Nottinghamshire village sign, turn around and then main road it to alfreton, hopefully in time for some tea and cake before setting off (the tea’s the important thing). If it turns out to be a good fast route then I’ll use it for other alfreton starts, saves on petrol and train fares.

This will also be a bit of a celebration of having my Super Randonneur award validated. (Super Randonneur is an award for completing a 200km, 300km, 400km and 600km audax in one season). Had been looking a bit touch and go after the GPS failure on the DIY 400 in September, but it looks like there was enough to accept it on. So that’s the main aim of the season done.

Well that was a fun day. Not feeling at my most prepared on the maths front, my fiancee off to hospital for a minor surgical procedure, and then to top it off work phones up with a Priority 1 failure of a business critical system and can I fix it. So I wasn’t in the greatest frame of mind when I sat down for the exam.

Turned the paper over and some of it looked good.

Most of section 1 looked like the past papers I’d been working on.There was only one that I didn’t attempt as I couldn’t spot anything in there and decided the time would be better spent on other questions. Though the inequality drove me crazy as I could see the answer, but the method to get there properly had disappeared.

Section 2 had an Eigenvalues/Eigenvector question, so that was great. But the rest of them looked unusual. Looks like the counting theorem question from the specimen paper is the new large cayley table question, shame I had no idea how to attempt that bit, but at least i got to draw some pretty squares for a bit. I don’t remember seeing counting theorem question in a TMA, but I’ve not been back to check conclusively. Another point for making sure to attend the Day schools.

So if you’re reading this in preparation for the 2012 M208 exam, then rely more on the specimen paper and the 2011 past paper if you can get hold of it as it looks like they’ve changed the format, which is annoying. And make sure you attend any day schools that you can, as hopefully the tutors will have been told roughly what to expect in the exam paper.

As with MS221, get really familiar with the handbook as it’s great for checking you’ve got the definitions or rules right. I added some example questions/solutions from past papers as well which made some of the explanations a bit easier to follow. I also added a few extra standard integrals/derivatives as I always panic that I’ve got them wrong, and they usually use the same standards, ie:

So having them stuffed away at the end is handy.

I’m confident I passed (>40%), but I don’t think I’ll be expecting any joyous news when the results dribble out in December. But it does mean that I’ve probably passed the module even with some not too bright TMA results.  Looking forward to a bit of a break from maths now for a couple of months.

I’m always up for a nice walk around some National Trust grounds (member for quite a few years now), so when they announced a ‘Fungal Foray’ at Calke Abbey we signed up for a couple of tickets.

This wasn’t a walk intended to show us which mushrooms were edible, it was to show the variety of fungi that exist in the Nature Reserve. I have done one of those at Calke before, but that wasn’t organised by the NT. The walk was guided by one of the rangers who was a pretty keen amateur mycologist but she was keen to correctly point out that she couldn’t 100% identify everything and to trust nothing. I decided to take the DSLR along as it’s been a while since it’s been used.

The walk was very informative. Specimens were a bit sparse due to the glorious weather we’d been having, so there were some points where the leader had to produce one she’d found earlier, or in a couple of occasions had moved from another site.

So here’s some photos from the day:

TMA07 came winging back nice and quickly. Slightly better mark than the last 2, just >70% which is good. Am reading up on the feedback while I work through past papers. Have mainly been concentrating on the Part 1 questions, I’d like to be pretty confident on those so I’ve more time for Part 2 papers.It’s shown up a few gaps in things, but I’m picking them up. Am also experimenting with different techniques, for instance with permutations I’ve found doing them long hand is quicker for me as I don’t waste time checking them. Am also getting good at finding relevant sections in the handbook.

I stupidly appear to have missed all the day schools for M208 as well, which is a very stupid thing as the MS221 ones were very handy. So far I’m getting slightly more confident that I’ll pass the exam (which will give me a pass for M208) but still not confident that I’ll pass with any great honours. So just see how it goes on the 11th.

Looking to the next course, it’s definitely going to be MST209 as M303 won’t be available for another year. Though I won’t be doing the residential school alongside it as it’s too much to pay out in one year, and it’s badly timed with regards to other real life bits (wedding, honeymoon and Mille Alba). The OU seems to have changed it’s eligibility for keeping the current fees a bit as well, so I need to check if I still qualify if I put off starting MST209 until September 2012. This would work better for the above events, and also I’m more likely to sit at home and work on it when the weather’s nasty and not conducive to an evening out on the bike.

Came up with this when I needed a quickish route for a DIY 200km Audax for September 2011 after a GPS failure on a 400km attempt meant that I had a break in my RRTY attempt. Nothing amazingly fancy, but because of the aforementioned GPS failure I wanted a route with some decent places to get ‘proof of passage’. Nottingham city centre is crawling with early opening places and cash machines, Bourne has a cash machine and a couple of early opening shops even on a Sunday morning, Woodhill Spa has plenty of cafes that do receipts, Lincoln has all the usual cash machines and then it’s back to Nottingham.

It’s all pretty good roads with very little that isn’t paved decently. There are a couple of mainish roads but nothing too horrible, and if you don’t mind a few extra kms most of the them can be avoided). I ended up time trialing it down the side of the A46 to Newark as I got caught in a big thunderstorm and wasn’t happy riding through the woods by thurlby with lightning about.

Most of the climbing, such as there is at 896m total, is in the first section to Bourne, though Carlton hill back into nottingham is a bit of a shock.

GPX of the route: here

nottingham - bourne - woodhall spa - lincoln - 200km profile

Not that I know much about this, but I seem to be getting a reasonable amount of hits from search engines from people looking it up. All I can really relate is what I’ve done this year to get round an SR (subject to validation atm) and what I’m planning to do over winter for next season’s targert (at least one SR, complete a RRTY, get some AAA points and also the 1000km Mille Alba in June)

I started riding in January 2011 after about 12 years off of riding bikes anything like regularly. I’d run a couple of half marathons in 2010, and a couple of years of Kendo before that. But mixed in with beer and smoking (don’t smoke now, but still enjoy the beer). So not a complete couch potato, but not the fittest by a long way.

This year I started by building up a reasonable base by cycling twice a week after work (<2 hours) and a longer ride (4-5 hours) at the weekend so by March I could happily go out at the weekend and do 80 miles without too much effort. This was enough to get me around a 300km event, though I wasn’t feeling too hot on that towards the end.

Then I started adding in some extra riding by commuting to and from work a couple of times a week (walking through the office in Lycra was one of the biggest hurdles), this meant I was getting in over a 100 miles a week. But not putting in too much effort unless I really felt like hurting myself on a hill. This was enough for me to get around a 600km

Over the summer I added more regular long rides (going for the RRTY award was a good motivator to keep up with 200km rides) and started thinking more about a HR training regime. So I turned on the feature on my Garmin 800 and started thinking a bit more about my base, and making more effort to control effort to about 70-75% HR. With once a week going a bit faster on a hilly stretch. This seems to have gotten me to a point where I can decided to do a 200km DIY on 24 hours notice, or not feel too worried about setting off on a solo 400km ride with expectations of completing in 20 hours.

So no real heavy cycle training yet. The main things I have learnt which make the difference are:

• What I can and need to eat/drink on a long ride. I’ve not got a pretty good idea of what I can cram in for calories without upsetting my stomach, and what to carry in water bottles that I don’t get bored of
• Night Riding. This was a new thing for me this year, and it’s been one of the best bits. Some of my favourite audax moments have been skimming along country roads with only my little pool of light with nature running under my front wheel (luckily I’ve managed to miss them all so far)
• Clothing – My first attempt at a 400 I overdressed and carried too much stuff. My second go (much later in the year) I wore less, and carried less.
• Comfort on the bike – Just putting the miles in means I fit better on my bike, and have learnt the warning signs for the onset of normal aches so I can adjust position or do some in place stretches
• Navigation – Much better now at having a quick glance at a map and spotting a main road or other better route if I need to make up time or route around a closed patch
• Weather – Been reasonably lucky this year with weather, but when it’s been bad it’s been really bad. So I’ve learnt to cope with 300k of head wind, getting soaked to the skin in <30 seconds and being in the middle of a major storm. So I know that I can cope with most things, or at least cope for long enough to find some shelter

So the plans for the winter and next year are looking like:

• Put in some more speed and strength work over the winter. A turbo may be procured, and I’ve joined work’s gym for some weight and their pilates/yoga classes for some flexibility
• More bad weather acclimatisation by carrying on the RRTY attempt
• Starting with the longer distances earlier in next year (Looking at the 300km Dean in March)
• Back to back long rides. So if I do the Skegness ride again next year, I’ll head out for another 300 on the sunday
• Reduce faff and time at controls, it’s always amazing to look at the GPS tracklog and see how much time was spent stationary and not moving. Am also going to try a bar bag or top tube bag so it’s easier to eat on the move.
• New positioning, am tempted to get some clip on aero bars so I’ve got a couple of extra positions and also to help out a bit with headwinds.

So nothing revolutionary there, but then again it’s all achievable, should make life easier on ‘standard’ distance audaxes and give me the best shot of getting round the longer ones without doing too much damage to myself.

There must be a word for that feeling the day after a great 400km DIY audax when you start uploading the log sections and find that one of the fit files won’t load off your garmin edge device. For the time being I’ll assume you understand the phrase knarked right off about covers it.

Once I’d tried all the available software options (Garmin Connect, Basecamp, Sporttracks, Golden Cheetah, etc) and still has no joy I decided it was time to take some drastic action. So I grabbed a copy of the FIT SDK from Ant+. This contains a tool (FitCSVTool.jar) that can break a FIT file down into a series of CSV files containg most of the information. It can also be used to recombine them into a FIT file once you’ve corrected any errors.

Once I’d got over the first problem with running the basic package (my Mac had it’s Java version in the wrong order) I started playing with the example files. The trick appears to be to carefully read the error messages when trying to recombine the file. Usually this tells you that X of Type Y is unknown at line Z. Correcting this is a case of find X of Y at Z and removing the Unknown field and then retrying the combine. This all seemed easy enough.

Except my file was so far gone it wouldn’t split down in CSV files properly so I got an error at that stage. Luckily it had created some intermediate CSV files that contained some information. Now all I had to do was convert and combine it into a workable format.

I’d told the splitter to create test.csv, and I found most of the useful information in test.csv.tmp. After about 17 rows of header information I had a row with the following fields (names in <> indicate a recorded value, those without are actual entries which appear to be identifiers:

Data,7,record,timestamp,<timestamp>,s,position_lat,<position_lat>,semicircles,position_long,<position_long>,semicircles,
distance,<distance>,m,altitude,<altitude>,m,speed,<speed>,m/s,heart_rate,<hear_rate>,bpm,cadence,<cadence>,rpm,
,temperature,<temperature>,c

So that all seems pretty straightforward as a list of type, value and units. So everything was looking good.

A quick bit of googling indicated that the semicircle units for latitude and longitude in the file could be converted into a decimal degree value by multiplying them by 180/(2^31).

The time was interesting. The number looked right to be an epoch value. But plugging a couple of test values into Unix’s date command returned a value 10 years out of date. So it appears that Garmin are using a different start to their epoch than everyone else (01/01/1960 00:00:00 as opposed to 01/01/1970 00:00:00). An epoch time is the number of seconds since a particular date, so to convert those values you need an app or function that can add seconds to a given date and return you another date. Unfortunately Excel on the Mac is missing VBA so doing the conversions was a bit tricky so I ended up having to do some playing around with shell scripts and the join command to build up a CSV of lat,lon,ele,date,time.

Once I’d got that I used the excellent site GPSVisualizer to convert it to a GPX and I was done.

Less impressed to find that I was still missing about 50km of route, and even worse it was just short of a control!! My local Organiser said it was worth submitting anyway, and it’s now been referred up the chain. So once again I’ve finished a cracking long ride and have no idea if I’ve completed it to AUK standards so I’ve no idea if it qualifies. On the plus side I had a great 20 hours out on the bike and managed to cope. Suprised i crawled all the way up Staxton Hill as well, 17% for a decent distance is good for me. Coming across the Humber bridge in the dark was great, and some very rural lanes across the top of Lincolnshire were great for spotting wildlife and feeling completely cut off from normality.

Enjoyed it so much that if it doesn’t validate I’ll do it again in a couple of weeks.

Noticed quite a few searches ending up here looking for these, so here’s where I’ve got them from if that’s of any use.

For  MS221 I used the past papers and solutions from http://open.wibble.to/ .They don’t have any past exam papers for M208, so I purchased and downloaded the pdfs from https://rsm2.rsmsecure.com/ousacart/webstore/store.php?itemsearch=M208 (they also have more up to date exam papers for MS221) .  The solutions for these past M208 papers were posted by the tutors in the M208 forums. I’ve also read good reports on the solution booklets for MS221 and M208 from Black Badge Press but haven’t personally used any of their materials.

Please note that all the solutions referenced above are not ‘official’ solutions, and don’t contain the full marking scheme as the Open University holds the copyrights on those.

There looks to be plenty more stuff dotted around the intertubes, but I can’t vouch for how accurate or usefull it all is.

Last week I got the Brevet card for the DIY LEL 600k (ride report part 1 + part 2) back in the post all stamped up, and the results on the AUK website as well. So I need a 400km ride to complete a Super Randonneur for this season.

Now having had an attempt at a 400km that failed after a saddle failure (details) and not really liking the thought that I’d left something uncompleted I decided to do a DIY based on the route. There is a permanent version of the ride I wanted the ability to not have to faff around getting to/from Alfreton at unsocial hours as I wanted to get most of the ride into 1 day (I’d rather not use up too much good will). So I’ve come up with rough copy for a DIY GPS with some of the control moved slightly. Routes up to distance on AutoRoute so I’ve submitted it to my Regional Organiser (who may be away on tour atm), but as it’s in AR I can be sure it’ll be accepted (definitely worth splashing the cash on a copy if you’re going to be doing any DIYs, I only paid £9 on ebay including P+P).

While I’ve done longer (once!) it’s going to be strange doing it on my own. I’ve a couple of rides up to 10 hours on my own, only interacting with shop staff or remonstrating with idiots, but this could be up to 28 hours. Hopefully I won’t go too loopy. While I’ve never had to resort to it yet, I may well have to deploy earphones and have some music to keep me motivated and alert.

Plus there’s going to be a fair chunk of night riding to get through whatever happens. I’m trying to work out when exactly to start so I can get the nightriding on decent roads, and miss traffic on some major road that feature on the route. And it’d be nice to be somewhere ‘sleepable’ if I do need a doze in the wee hours. Current thinking is mid morning start so I miss the traffic on the first section, and then a longish rest/dinner break in Helmsley or Pickering (depending on progress) to avoid too much traffic on the A170. Should have me crossing the Humber Bridge just after midnight, hopefully getting back to nottingham just in time to go to bed as S gets up.

Well TMA06 seems to have gone reasonably well. Answered everything and I’m reasonably certain about quite a few of the answers as well. Having a couple of pieces of decent length downtime to work on it helped quite a bit. It’s all LaTeXed now, so I just need to add some hboxes for the sketch graphs and I can post it off to my tutor.

Hoping this carries on with TMA07 as there’s not long to get it done (it’s due 2 weeks after TMA06). And then it’s cracking on with the revision for the Exam a month later. Need to order some past M208 exam papers as there don’t seem to be any floating around the interwebs for M208, Luckily they can be downloaded (here) so no chance of the royal mail losing them.

Pretty much decided that I’ll be doing MST209 next year. Though not sure about doing the residential school (MSXR209) as that’ll add a hefty whack to the year which I could do without (wedding’s aren’t cheap).

Found a bit of my M208 mojo’s returned with the final Analysis section. Hopefully it’ll show through in the TMA as well.

I’d not really been paying attention to the OU’s fee announcements as I’d not really twigged how much they’d be affected by the current government decision to dumb down the UK population. Like most people I can’t really afford £2500 a year to do a course for ‘fun’ and improvement. Luckily I can still get the ‘cheap’ current prices as I’m already studying and have ticked the box saying ‘working towards qualification’. But it means I have to study every year, which blows my plan of taking next year off to have a break. Though I suppose I could always find something ‘simple’ in a 20 credit point size that won’t actually occupy much time.

It’s a sad sad day when one of the greatest things to come out of the UK Higher Education system (the ability for anyone anywhere to study a HE course at any time without previous experience) is being ripped up by a purely ideological attempt to reshape the HE market by a bunch of idiots who don’t understand it. Also makes me laugh when our PM talks about building a Knowledge economy, where’s this knowledge coming from if we’re not educating our population?

Audaxing does seem to be changing how I look at distances and travel. When the opportunity came up to visit some family to help clear out a shed in Luton, my first though was “Wonder if there’s a ride in that?”. Lo and behold, with a couple of well chosen controls it appeared there was a rather nice little 200K available. Started plotting with google maps, but after a few inconsistencies with the length I went onto Ebay and got a copy of Autoroute 2005 (probably much to the delight of my regional organiser) so there now wasn’t any mucking around for distances. The final controls were:

• Nottingham
• Averham
• Newark
• Bourne
• Great Barford
• Luton

Quality Audax roads

Quality Audax roads 2

Audax Roads 3

After that I started to hit a bit of a rough patch. All the usual lack of energy, lack of drive and enthusiasm. The going wasn’t particularly tough so I’m sort of putting this down to 3 things:

• Heat, I’m not a hot weather person
• Lack of food. I’d not eaten as much as usual while riding, and not much during the morning either.
• Lack of liquid. I’d not really drunk much at work before leaving. And thanks to a new larger water bottle I’d not been diluting my lucozade, which I think make a difference as I’m not sure if I  need the liquid more than I need the sugar

After getting over the Nottingham to Edinburgh bike ride (here and here), which didn’t take as long as I thought it would (was back out on the bike on the Tuesday for 40 miles). I decided I wanted to work a bit more on performance as it would appear that my general pace and feeding habits will survive a 600km reasonably well, but a bit more pace or a little more in the engine for climbing would probably bring a bit more time for refueling or sleeping.

Over the last few weeks I’d been managing to get some decent mileage in (averaging about 100 miles a week), so it seemed like a good time to add some structure. As much as I love my gadgets I couldn’t justify the cost of a PowerTap at the moment (one day, though), so I though I’d better investigate how simple it was to use my Garmin Edge 800 as a HR monitor. That bit seemed nice and easy as I’d bought the chest strap at the same time and occasionally used it for some nice stats. One thing that caught me out the first couple of times was forgetting to wet it before putting it on, so it would be intermittent unti I’d got a bit of a sweat on, d’oh.

Next trick was trying to work out my maximum heart rate. Not really being able to think of any long hills that I’d want to try a ‘ramp’ test up due to their traffic volume, and getting no response to an enquiry to a testing centre I decided to use this HR calculator. Not the most accurate method, but it’ll do for now. I’m thinking that I’ll try one cycle (about 12 weeks) of training, see how it’s gone and then try to chase down a proper test. That said a ‘spiritied’ blast up the hill at the end of my commute hit 100% and I don’t think there was much if any left in the tank. So I’ve entered all that info in the 800, though I’ve condensed Levels 5+6 as there’s only 5 on the Garmin and I don’t think I’ll be exploring that territory for a bit:

Part 1 is here

06:00 seemed to come round far too early and there was some muffled swearing as we struggle upright. Amazing how long it can take to pack a couple of carradices. Thankfully all the kit had dried so it wasn’t too unpleasant putting shorts and jerseys back on again. For a nice warm up we had a brisk 1 mile TT up the A1 to Scotch Corner for breakfast.  Amused by being asked by the manager of Costa Coffee “Are those your bikes?”, unfortunately we were a bit too groggy to reply wiht “no, we just wear the lycra for comfort”. Apparently it’s a hygiene offence to bring a bike in, which is solved by leaning it on the other side of a barrier (and tbh, I reckon we were probably more of a hygiene risk than our bikes).

A brief spring along the A66 helped to settle breakfast, though also led to a breakup of the team as we had different ideas on which turning to take. So a solo mornig ride along the lanes to Barnard castle enjoying another glorious morning. Few small lumps, but with a general upward trend. Swooping down a big hill towards a bridge when I suddenly realised it was actually a wooden planked bridge meant I got to check how good my brakes were, seem to be up to the job. Though throwing on the anchors meant the hill straight afterwards was done from scratch, the hairpin half way up was quite fun in a fantasy TdF way.

Another CoOp receipt collected from Barnard Castle and we were away on the climb up and over Alston Moor. This was going to be one of the high points of the route climbing up to 600+ metres. All you had to do was settle into a good rythym and keep on turning the cranks over and over and over. The wind was still being relentless which meant here wasn’t much respite on the flats or downhills either, and a couple of big swoops added to the total climbing a bit as well. A cheer accompanied the Edge confirming that I’d hit the high point and I could enjoy the downhill into Alston. Finally a chance to spend some quality time with my arse off the saddle to try and restore some blood flow! The market square in alston was a nice place to stock up on some carbs, and listen to an accordion player murdering classic pop tunes for a bit.  Then a bit more of an uphill section to Brampton that our profile chart had suggested. Yet another coop stop here (noticing a pattern?) as this was a control.

Onwards, and on this section we crossed the England/Scotland border just outside Gretna, unfortunately the quality of picture from an iPhone isn’t brilliant for recording this momentous moment, but just to break up this huge screed you can marvel at the lack of proper cycling physique here:

Just after this we started what was the hardest section of the entire route for me. The long slog along the B7076 was interminable. Awful surface, no respite from the wind, no real scenery to distract the brain and the constant sound of the M74 was soul destroying. My joy at the right turn onto the A701 was nearly unparalleled and sped me into Moffat for another CoOp control (Maybe we should have tried for sponsorship from them?)

The next section from Moffat to Craigmillar was the last. And it certainly made up for the previous one. Starting with a proper long climb to 400m we topped out with a golden light over the hills. Then followed a good rolling road with stunning views which gradually disappeared as we pedalled into our second night. Edinburgh started appearing on the road signs so we knew we were getting closer. The last few miles around the south east side of edinburgh had some amazing downhill sections, enlivened by being done in the dark. And then hurtling down residential roads with street light chicaning through traffic calming measure bought a smile. Final control was that late night favourite of a cash point on a deserted high street.

So all in, an absolutely excellent ride. While I disliked some bits, they were more than outweighed by the majority of the route. Contact points seemed to have held up well, though I still have very slight numbness in my hands and a sore spot on my back, the most annoying bits have been a bit of sunburn and the midge bits. I was very happy with my fitness, my climbing ability seemed to improve over the ride, though I think a lot of that was just getting better at finding a pace that didn’t redline me. here’s the HR%/height graph for the last section and I’m happy to have stayed in Zone 2 most of the time:

Unfortunately that’s one of only 2 bits of GPS track that I’ve got of the ride. So a good job I decided to collect receipts at control points then. Except, we might have controlled at the wrong spot on the last leg. So I’m just waiting for the organiser to get back to me so I know what’s happening. Wether it’s a valid AUK ride or not it was a great one so nothing to get too upset over, I knew the ‘rules’ before I set off so I can only blame my sleep deprived brain. Just means I might still have to do another 600km ride this year for an SR series. A slightly more pressing issue is trying to fit a 200km into the next 5 days so I can keep my RRTY going!

So the idea sounded nice and simple. Both of us needed a 600 to complete a Super Randonneur series and couldn’t get on any of the calendar events in a PBP year due to timings, so let’s do a DIY, and why not route test the LEL 2013 route as well. So after a bit of fiddling with routes we came up with this lot that passed the organiser’s scrutiny:

• Nottingham
• Spalding (join LEL route here)
• Market Rasen
• Pocklington
• Thirsk
• Skeeby (not on LEL route, but we stopped at the travelodge)
• Barnard Castle
• Brampton
• Moffat
• Edinburgh/Bonnyrigg

We decided to follow the proposed route as neither of us really knew the areas it was passing through, so we took the route sheet from here and a set of GPX tracks were taken from here.

I decided I was going to be paranoid and collect receipts at controls as well as rely on the Edge 800 for tracking.

So we set off from Nottingham Station at 7am on the Friday. Gorgeous weather, blue skies and dry. After about 30 minutes we stopped to take off arm warmers and I had to change the lenses in my glasses for something darker. The hill out of Woolsthorpe was a bit of a lung warmer, but a nice test of things to come. Was a bit concerned with how I was going  to cope with the northen sections of the route as I’m not really a grimpeur and my lowest gear is 36″, once that’s been deployed the next drop is to the old shank’s 24″ one. But more on that later. The ride across the fens was pretty good, very slight wind occasionally but nowhere as viscious as I’ve had on other rides across them which lulled us into a false sense of security. We controlled at a desserted Garden Centre in spalding with that ever present Audaxer staple of beans on toast and a pot of tea.

Now we turned north and things took a bit of a change. There’s not many North/South roads across the fens that aren’t reasonably sized trunk roads (or at least used like them). Though the traffic wasn’t the worst of the problems as we now settled into a headwind that was going to keep us company all the way to Moffat, though we didn’t know that then. On the flatter roads of Lincolnshire we worked as a pair making good time. Was impressed with a Typhoon landing closing the road and Conningsby. Thinking we’d miss some of the headwind and be able to make up time on the other side of the humber we stopped for lunch at Woodhill Spa as we knew a decent cafe there from the skeggy ride.

Unfortunately the wind hadn’t died down so we got back into formation and pushed onto Market Rasen where we had the other audax staple of Frijj on the forecourt of a petrol station. Coming out of MR we had a bit of a break from just grinding into a headwind as the climb onto the Wolds appeared. Luckily it was about the right gradient to get into a nice steady tempo and make some progress. But then plenty of downhill to Barton and the bridge, which you can see from miles away so gives a nice target to aim for. Managed to negotiated all the cyclepaths to cross the bridge successfully, though we did end up ‘hopping’ a couple of kerbs near the visitor’s centre, but this was probably because we didn’t actually look at the rotue sheet? Got seperated a bit by the terrain which wasn’t helped by ending up at different spots in Pocklington, and the discovering there were 2 CoOps there.

By this time we knew that the wind was in for the rest of the ride and that we’d lost a lot of time on the first couple of sections, so our original plan of being in bed for midnight was looking very suspect. Especially as we were now entering hill country. This section had one of the real highlights of the route, we passed through the grounds of Castle Howard as the sun set aboyut 21:30/22:00 and it was glorious. We pulled up around the top of the hill to see the monument, then dropped towards the first gate and then rose to the second gate with the obelisk lit up, absolutely gorgeous. We then had fun cycling the back roads to Thirsk through the darkening night with badger, foxes and rabbits for company. Then we had the company of Thirk’s youthful inebriated inhabitants while we quickly got a bank receipt and headed for Skeeby. Some more quite road bashing and a final scary mile up the hard should of the A1 and we collapsed into the room for 02:30 @ 350km, which put us about 2 hours behind out predicted time. And we hadn’t expected to be that tired after day 1. Though I had just set myself a new distance record, so at least something was looking up.

Low points of the day? The wind, the slowness and dropping my iPhone again (hence no photos as I was too worried about doing even more damage).

High Points: Castle Howard, the Lanes to Thirsk, and generally feeling pretty good all day.

Part 2 here.

So i’ve done the ride, the computers say >600km and my body is certainly aware of having ridden that distance. But the GPS ate 4 of the 6 tracks, 1 of my control receipts is possibly in the wrong place and there’s nothing I can do till I hear from the organiser one way or another.

Does that make it 2 wasted days and effort? Not a bit of it. I got to spend a considerable amount of time enjoying myself on a bike seeing some wonderful bits of the country and proving to myself that I can cover huge (well, to me) distances under my own steam.

So until I hear back I’ll just have to sit here at work with numb hands and wait for the email to come through.

Been a bit quite on the M208 front recently. Things haven’t been going so well and I’ve been busy so I’ve let things slide (it’s hard to do thing when they’re not easy!)

Got the marks back for TMA04 (Analysis A) and was a bit disappointed with the mark I got. I’d missed a couple of fundamental points and made a couple of howlers.

TMA05 is due in next week and I’m still only halfway through Book 2 on Homomorphisms and there’s still Book 3 Group Actions to go through. So it’s really starting to feel like a bit of a struggle.

And that’s not helped by the fact that I’m probably going to miss another tutorial this evening. Work’s been crazy this week (23:30 and 20:00 finishes) so i’d quite like an early night and spending some time with S before heading up to Edinburgh on Friday (and it’d be nice to get some sleep before trying to ride 600km as well)

I don’t really feel that the materials sinking in either due to the speed I’m having to cram it in, so I’m already bricking about the exam in October.

I’m going to keep on going with the course as I’m interested in the Maths, but I’m not so sure now about getting a full degree as that’ll mean trying to get good marks rather than just learning. Will have to think quite hard about wether to do another course next year (probably MST209 if anything)

One strange thing I think that’s not been helping is the fact that I’ve been cycling into work a lot more, and there’s not room in a Carradice Barley to fit an OU book and a pad of paper. I’ve got the electronic copies on my phone and PC, but it’s not easy to read them while working through exercises and flick back and forth. I can’t really justify the cost of something like a kindle/ipad to just leave at work for OU stuff or the impact of printing off the electronic copies either. Really should have got a bike with rack eyes!

Well, I’m hoping this is what I should be carrying, as this is a first attempt so I could be horrendously wrong.

All of this will be going in a Carradice Barley, supported on a bagman with a small drysac on top. So it should end up looking something like this:

Bike loaded up for a 400km audax

(That was prior to the Moors+Wolds 400, fingers crossed the same thing doesn’t happen with the saddle (though this  thread on YACF isn’t helping any))

In the barley:

• Tyre Levers
• 2 spare inner tubes
• puncture patches
• multi-tools (leatherman for blades and an Alien for allen keys and chain splitter)
• spare chain links
• Spare batteries for lights and GPS recharger
• Nunn tablets to add to water for cola/banana flavoured energy
• Couple of mars bars
• malt loaf
• Wallet
• phone
• pages torn out of a road atlas in case of battery failure
• brevet card
• leg warmers
• long finger gloves
• cap
• buff
• space blank
• toothbrush and toothpaste
• ibuprofen, sudocrem, immodium
• tissues and moist wipe
• hand cleanser

In the drysac will go:

• Long sleeve jersey for overnight
• A pair of bib tights as spares in case of any problems
• sun glasses

In jersey pockets

• Arm warmers
• sugary sweets

Hanging off the bagman:

• Waterproof
• Spare tyre

Hopefully it’ll all fit. Glad I don’t have a rack or I’d probably end up taking even more junk with me. Once I’ve finished the ride I’ll know what was worth taking, though I don’t think there’s much I could do without. This is for a DIY 600 cross some remote bits of Yorkshire and Scotland (we’re following the London-Edinburgh-London 2013 northbound route), so I want to make sure I’ve got plenty to get through if thing go wrong in the wrong place.