Sponsored ride update: 1 down, 1 DNF, 2 to go.

By now I should have completed 2 of my 4 2013 sponsored rides unfortunately though that is not the case!

Nightrider

For the first week in June I was preparing for Nightrider and really looking forward to it. I was taking it easy on my normal commuting rides (partly to recover from King of the Downs, partly to be rested for Nightrider), I cut down on the number of my commuting rides and I was also staying up much later at night to get my body clock prepared for my late night ride. On Thursday night I stayed up till midnight and got up at 9. On Friday night I stayed up till 4 and slept till 12.

On Saturday night I was ready and raring to go. My wonderful support crew Linzi dropped me off and at 10:30 I was ready to go well ahead of my 11:10 start time. The event was running a little ahead of time so I was able to start a bit earlier than my allotted time. We had a brief talk about safety and then we were off, along a short access road out of Crystal palace, up to a junction with a main road and off down the first hill. I was really looking forward to my cycle through London through the middle of the night.

Whilst going down this hill, HALF a mile into the ride there was a very loud bang and my rear tyre was completely flat. I managed to stop the bike without falling off and was grateful that I had 3 spare inner tubes on me and a spare tyre - I felt very well prepared. Unfortunately though that wasn't going to help me. My actual wheel had broken, the steel rim had come away from the rest of the wheel...

Well, I didn't have a spare wheel on me! The mechanics at the start point didn't have a spare wheel either so there was nothing I could do - I had to give up. Without a rear wheel I couldn't do the route. I couldn't even wheel my bike along as the broken rim was rubbing on the brakes.

I was really disappointed by this, utterly gutted. This was the ride that I was looking forward to the most. I am doing Nightrider in Paris later in the year but I don't know Paris, it's not my city so it's not as special.

Anyway, these things happen. Time to move on...

London to Brighton

Next up in my series of rides was London to Brighton (L2B). This is the 4th time I've done this ride (the 3rd time I've done it for the British Heart Foundation). It's a nice ride that's not too hard - other than the final hill Ditchling Beacon. I made similar preparations for this ride as I did for Nightrider, took my commuting rides a bit easy and took a few less rides.

Linzi had done a great job putting together a T-shirt for me with Alastair on the front and with a list of all my rides on the back. I do these rides because I enjoy them but I am really pleased to be able to raise money for the BHF in Alastair's memory. This T-shirt lets people know why I am doing the rides.

I had been lucky enough to get a 6:00 AM start which was great as there would be less traffic on the route, it did mean a 4:30 alarm though to give me enough time to get up, get the bike ready, cycle the 10 miles to the start and get there 30 minutes before the start. This didn't quite work out and I was a little bit later than I wanted getting to Clapham Common at about 5:45. There was already a pretty big queue:

I got started at about 6:10 once all the people in front of me got through the narrow gate at the exit of Clapham Common. There were a lot of people in front of me but after 5 miles or so they thinned out quite a bit.

I had a great ride and really enjoyed it. I felt really strong and was going pretty quick for the whole 53 miles. Even right at the end after the tough ascent of Ditchling Beacon I was able to do a sprint finish getting up to 29 MPH to finish in about 10 seconds short of 3 hours 30 minutes. About 30 minutes better than last year.

You can see how many people I was passing during the ride in this time lapse video I uploaded:

For anyone that's interested you can see the full details from this ride on Strava:


That's about it for now. The next ride is the 100 mile London ride in early August. I am planning on doing a 75 mile ride around 3 weeks before that in preparation. I'll do another update after the London 100 as that one is going to be a bit of a challenge. 100 miles is a long way and will be the longest I've ever ridden.

If you haven't sponsored me yet and would like to please visit my Just Giving page:

https://www.justgiving.com/bigBlokeOnABike2013

2013 Sponsorship and Training update

Well the sponsorship effort is going pretty well so far so thank you to everyone who has donated. I have raised £970 of my chosen target of £1000 so far so very close to reaching it. I am confident that by the time I have completed all my events I'll get there.

Yesterday (Sunday) I did my first and only proper training ride this year. This was The King of the Downs, a ride organised by Evans cycles that I did last year. It is a 55 mile ride with 5 tough hills. This is actually probably tougher than all of my rides except for the 100 mile ride in August.

I was really pleased with my performance on the ride. I managed to shave nearly half an hour off my moving time (4ish hours down to 3 and a half) from last year and pretty much an hour off my total time. This was largely because I only stopped once and didn't walk up any of the hills.

As well as improvements in the overall time I got much better times on all the hills in the ride. This is not really a surprise as I am over 40lbs (about 18 kgs) lighter this time round than last year. That is quite a lot of extra weight to haul up the hills so I had a big advantage this time!

The ride details are here if you want a look: http://app.strava.com/activities/57699006

Other than this ride I haven't done any specific training at all but I have been doing my normal commute to work - this is up to 180 miles a week if I ride all 5 days. In a normal week I will cycle all 5 days.

In May there was a challenge on Strava to do 1000km in one month. I thought that I was going to reach this but missed by only about a day's commute! Too many bank holidays and things to get to after work! I shouldn't have a problem getting to 1000km in June though with all my charity rides.

This Saturday is the first charity ride. It's the London Nightrider which I am really looking forward to. Last year was great fun and I hope it'll be just as good this year.

The weekend after that is the London to Brighton ride which I am looking forward to as well. I've got a nice early start (6:00 AM) so shouldn't have problems with traffic getting in my way.

I think the weekend after that I'll have a bit of a rest after 3 weekends filled with 50 mile plus rides!

That's it for now. I'll do another update and let you know how the first lot of charity rides go.

2013 Sponsored Ride Update

Hello! (if there are any other readers left out there).

I am resurrecting the blog to update you on my sponsored rides that I am doing in 2013 (and hopefully persuade a few of you to sponsor me!).

Since my last update in 2011 I've cycled very nearly 10,000 miles on my new bike (although really not very new anymore) and have lost over 50 lbs so am now slightly less of a Big Bloke on a Bike!

2012 was a difficult year for my wife and I as my father in law died very unexpectedly in February at the age of 60. He had a heart condition which we did know about but had no idea how serious it was.

In 2012 I cycled in support of the British Heart Foundation in memory of Alastair and I will be doing so again in 2013. Last year I managed to raise a massive £1697 thanks to many friend's and families generosity.

Me after the 2012 London Nightrider

Alastair's death was a huge shock to all of us and obviously caused a lot of upheaval in the McNair family. He was a wonderful man and we all miss him very much. I hope that by supporting the BHF I can help to prevent this happening to another family.

This year I am upping the bar a little and will be doing 4 events totaling 277 miles!

These events are:

• Nightrider London 8th June - 100 KM (62 miles) round London starting at around midnight 
• London to Brighton 16th June - 53 miles from Clapham Common to Brighton 
• London 100 4th August - 100 miles starting at the Olympic park, round the Olympic cycle route on closed roads finishing on the Mall 
• Nightrider Paris 21st September - 100 KM (62 miles) round Paris starting at around midnight This is quite a step up from the 2 events that I did last year. 

100 miles in one ride is a long way so I need to prepare for this. The first two rides should be fairly easy without any preparation and they will be good preparation for the long ride in themselves. I am also doing King of the Downs the week before Nightrider. That's a 115 mile or 50 mile ride over 10 big hills around the Epsom Downs. I'll be doing the shortened 50 mile, 5 hill ride and then hopefully recover in time for Nightrider the following week.

Between London to Brighton (which is the week after Nightrider) and the London 100 I've got nearly 2 months. I've got a couple of free weekends then so I'm planning on doing a 75 mile or so to get ready for the big 100.

So far I've not really done any specific training. I've had 3 weeks back on the bike after being ill for a few weeks. In those 3 weeks I've done over 500 miles which is some pretty good training, particularly as I had some very strong head winds.

Anyway, I think that'll do for now. I'll try to post updates with how I am doing in my preparations for the big ride.

If you would like to donate to the British Heart Foundation and make all I am doing worthwhile please visit my just giving page here:

https://www.justgiving.com/bigBlokeOnABike2013/

New Bike Update / Box Hill

I have now had my new bike for about 2 weeks. In that time I’ve done nearly 200 miles.

Generally I love the bike and it is making my commute an awful lot easier and I’m saving up to about 20 minutes each way!

On my hybrid my goal was to average 15 MPH on the way into work which equated to a moving time of just over 1 hour and 10 minutes and a total time of around 1 hour 20 up to about 1 hour 30.
I only managed to average 15 MPH 2 or 3 times.

My goal on the new bike is to average 17 MPH and I have done this twice and it wasn’t incredibly difficult! My ride time these 2 times was 1 hour and 3 minutes with total time around 1 hour and 7 minutes.

The bike is SO much easier to pedal. You do notice a hill or a headwind but just push on the pedals a bit harder and you fly up the hill!

Today I did a 25 mile route on the bike including Box Hill. This is the longest I have ridden on the bike in one go and the saddle was fine. My arms and shoulders did get quite tired as they are still getting used to the new riding position. Generally on my commute my arms are ok so they are definitely getting used to the new bike gradually.

I was pretty pleased with the Box Hill climb today. I did Box Hill last year on an Evans Ride. I say in that blog that the hills were tough and that I was in the lowest gear a lot doing 5 MPH. Today the ascent wasn’t easy – particularly the start which was hovering around a grade of 7 – 8% but I was doing around 7 or 8 MPH most of the time not 5 or 6 (which I know is a small difference but it’s a significant one). What is more significant is that I didn’t have to use my Granny gear at all and stayed in the middle gear for the whole cycle.
The start of the ride was quite tough as I was battling against a headwind of 16 MPH gusting to 32MPH!

Here is the ride details in full:

So, in summary: I am loving the new bike and wish I’d got it sooner!

Garmin 800

When I got my new bike I also got a new bike computer. A Garmin 800. I’ve wanted one of these for quite a while but as they are pretty expensive I’ve not got round to getting one. When I bought my new bike I could get a discount on any accessories I ordered so it made sense to get buy it at the same time.

My last cycle computer had many of the features that the 800 does:

• Speed
• distance
• Cadence
• heart rate
• calories
• heart rate limits

It kept records of the last 8 rides that I had done with distance, average and max speed and cadence ect but that was it, it only recorded totals and averages not details of the route itself.

The Garmin 800 records all of the same data but it records all these points for the whole ride so that you get graphs of all these over the ride along with a map of where you have been. The Garmin also records temperature and elevation. It also calculates calories more accurately using heart rate.

All this data is uploaded to a website and you can share the page with anyone you would like in many different ways.

Here is a sample ride that I did today:

If you click on View Details you’ll see all the information recorded. There are graphs of Speed, Elevation, Heart Rate, Cadence and Temperature. If you click on player you can plot 2 of these data sets against each other and play the route back.

If you upload all your rides you can also get reports of miles per week over the last year for example.

I am a gadget geek and like quantifying things. I like getting all this data about my rides. I also like knowing how hot it is when I am out for a ride and knowing what grade I am currently going up or down.

As well as all this data you get the cycle computer is a full blown sat nav that you can use to navigate home or to navigate cross country through a track through a forest.
If I do another Evans ride I can download a GPX file before that ride. I can then upload it to my cycle computer and then just follow the directions on the cycle computer rather than have to look out for arrows and rely on maps (which didn’t always work).

Another feature is a virtual training partner that you can race against. This can either be a previous recorded route that you are doing again and you want to race yourself the last time you did it or you can just set a speed that the virtual partner will stick to.

The computer is also very configurable. On the timer pages you can display up 10 different data fields from a selection of about 50! My first page is set up like this:

This shows:

• Speed
• Distance
• Average Speed
• Heart Rate
• Cadence
• Grade

These are all the fields that I am most interested in as I am cycling along to see how I am performing.

My second timer screen looks like this:

This shows:

• Speed
• Distance
• Calories burnt
• Time elapsed
• Temperature
• Time of day

These are fields that I only want to look at a few times on my ride. I include Speed and Distance again as these are the 2 most important and I always want to see these,

I could if I wanted to set up another 2 screens like this but this is plenty for me.

There are also a whole load of other things that you can do with the computer but these are the features that I am most interested in.

I’m really pleased with the computer and I look forward to it telling me in a years time how my weekly mileage has varied over the winter for example and to keep track of my performance on routes which I do a lot such as my commute.

Scott Speedster S30

Yesterday I picked up my new bike. A Scott Speedster S30. In the tradition of naming Oliver I had to name this bike as well. As he is a Scott Linzi (my Scottish wife) suggested Angus so Angus it is.

I had originally wanted an S35 which is a UK version of the S30. I think all it adds is mounts for mud guards. I don’t think I am going to be adding mud guards to this bike and there were no S35s in stock anywhere so an S30 in fine. I have added a pannier as I need it to take stuff into work but I plan to use Oliver when it’s very wet or icy in the winter so mudguards on this bike are less important.

When I picked the bike up from bikelab the pannier had already been added and the bike had already been setup for me based on my bike fit that I had done last week. I had also asked for SPD pedals for my cycle shoes and for a couple of water bottle cages.

I had also ordered a Garmin Edge 800. I had wanted a cycle computer like that for a long time. I did have a plan to write an application that did most of the same things for my phone but I just never got time and it would have never been quite as good. Ordering this with the bike meant that I could negotiate a discount so it was sensible to order at this point.

I was a bit nervous about riding a proper drop handle bar road bike. I was concerned about a few things with a road bike:

• bent over riding position causing legs to hit gut all the time
• sore back from being bent over so far
• saddle comfort
• gears not low enough to cope with hills

I still struggle with hills a little more than most cyclists as I still have a bit more ballast than most to lug around.

I had possibly foolishly decided to cycle back from bikelab on my brand new bike that I was not used to. I also took a bit of a detour through Richmond Park:

The route was about 11 miles all in so long enough to work out how well I was going to get on with the bike.

I was surprised how well I got on right from the off. Bikelab had obviously done a great job setting the bike to my requirements. The bike also felt really easy to ride, the power train felt much smoother and much easier to get the power to the road.

Pretty much all of my concerns were unfounded. I’ve done about 27 miles on the bike since I got it and have been very surprised with the saddle comfort. In fact I think my backside is more comfortable on this bike than my hybrid! My back has also been fine and my gut doesn’t get in the way at all!

I have gone up a few inclines, the steepest of which was 6% and I have still not had to go down into the lowest front sprocket so I still have some low gears in reserve for steep hills like Ditchling Beacon that I am going to come across on my charity ride.

The only problem I am having on the bike is getting sore hands and arms. My hands are already adapting and I didn’t have a problem with them today but my triceps are getting quite sore. They’re not used to my arms reaching so far forward and taking some of my weight. I am pretty sure that this will get better quite quickly.

I am also not quite as confident nipping through traffic as I feel a little unstable because of the sensitive steering.

I did a second ride on the bike today:

I was marginally quicker on this route than I was on the hybrid but only by about 5 seconds! I am actually quite pleased with this though as today on the road bike it was quite windy and I had half my rear brake on for the first half of the ride. My legs were also pretty sore from a hard ride I had on Thursday and the rides I have done since then. I should be able to go much quicker when I am better prepared.

I am very happy with my new bike and am looking forward to comparing my commuting times on it compared to my hybrid.

Bikelab

For a while I’ve been having “comfort issues” on my bike getting very saddle sore. Some weeks I’ve not ridden the 3 days I usually do as I’ve been “resting” (letting my backside recover).

I’ve tried a few things like a new saddle but a big recommendation from forums is getting a proper bike fit that adjusts your bike for your exact measurements.

On Saturday I went to bikelab to get measured and get my bike adjusted.

I was very impressed with bikelab. All the staff were helpful, friendly and knowledgeable. The shop is new and well presented and has a good selection of bikes to choose from.

During the bike fit a your feet, height, torso, shoulder height, seat height and probably a few things that I have forgotten are all measured and then plugged into a website. You then tell the website what sort of bike you have and which profile you want.

I got a Road Hybrid Comfort setup and a Road Bike Comfort setup. For each type of setup you get frame geometry measurements to tell you what size frame you need:

And setup measurements to show you what crank, saddle position and handlebar positions you need:

The shop used the measurements above to adjust my hybrid. My saddle was a bit low, tilted back a bit too far and a bit too far back. My frame generally was too small (a 57cm frame instead of a 59). To compensate for this I need around 20cm of saddle post showing above the frame and I need a longer stem.

So far I have not managed to find a longer stem but the adjustments really seems to have made a difference. I have ridden the bike about 130 miles in the week since the adjustments were made and I have been much more comfortable and with the slightly higher saddle position peddling seems a bit easier as well.

I have been meaning to order a road bike for a while. In face I was looking at bikes back in October but have not made much progress. This seemed to be a good time to order a new bike, particularly as I would then get the bike fit for free, saving me around £70. I wasn’t looking for a particularly high end bike, I certainly didn’t want Carbon Fibre and wanted to spend around £1000. The Scott Speedster S30 seemed like a good fit. Using the geometry popup on the Scott website I ordered a XXL bike.

I was very impressed with bike lab and so far I have been very impressed with the results of the bike fit.
The only disappointment was that they did not adjust the cleats on my shoes. When I first got my shoes it took me a while fiddling with them before they felt right and I wanted some confirmation that they were OK. I do occasionally get sore knees but since the bike fit they’ve been fine so maybe the adjustments to the bike were enough to solve that.

I’ll be posting a review of my new bike soon.