A second century ride...

Maybe it was an alignment of the planets, maybe it was the inspiration drawn from watching the opening ceremony of the London Olympics the night before, but yesterday I managed my second ever 100mile cycle ride. To be precise, 101.4miles! Who knows... it may even have been as a result of the huge amount of Chinese food (and a bottle of beer!) that I consumed whilst watching the Olympics! Whatever it was, after a summer that has been more or less washed out by the weather, it felt great to be able to do this ride.

 

I’ll not go into the full details of the route (too long and too boring to list every place name) but, briefly, it took me east from Derby into the country lanes and villages of South Nottinghamshire, skirted around Loughborough, as I crossed through Leicestershire, on the way back into South Derbyshire before heading out onto more familiar roads around Melbourne, Hartshorne, Repton, Hilton and Longford. From there, I turned back towards Derby for the final 20mile run in to home and a well earned recovery milkshake!

The Garmin GPS stats for the ride are...

Total distance - 101.4 miles.
Total time - 5hrs 37 mins.
Max speed - 32.8 mph.
Average speed - 18 mph.
Calories burnt - approx 3,500.
Average heart rate - 151 bpm.
Max heart rate - 180 bpm.

The Strava map and elevation profile for the ride are HERE.

We're half way there...

Well, June has come and gone and with it half the year is now behind us. Somehow, I’ve managed to ride a total of 2936.42 miles in the last six months which puts me very close to reaching the half way point of my goal of riding at least 6,000 miles this year.

The weather has, once again, been more of a challenge than the actual cycling over the past month with the rain and strong winds putting paid to any chance of me getting any big rides in. The longest ride I did was the ride up to Alport Heights, a distance of just 40 miles. As a result, the total mileage for the month of June was 471.16 miles - around 200 miles less than I would have liked!

This past weekend has seen the passing of a long-time friend. After many years of faithful service my old mountain bike has come to the end of the line and been killed off. For the last couple of years I’ve faced a constant battle to keep it roadworthy but this time the costs involved didn’t make this worth doing any more. Quite how many miles the bike had covered I’ll never know (I didn’t log its mileage for many years) but I'd ridden it for over 11,000 miles in the past three years alone! I’d owned the bike for over 16 years so it certainly didn’t owe me anything!

The bike was stripped of it’s tyres, mudguards, lights and rear gear mechanism (the only usable parts!) and handed over to the scrap-man on Saturday. Farewell old friend, I’ll miss you!

Alvaston Park. A regular

haunt of the mountain bike.

All set to raise money for the

Britsh Heart Foundation.

Sherwood Forest - November 2008.

36 miles of thick mud and heavy rain!

The end of a very grim ride!

The end of the road! June 2012.

Removing anything of use.

A sad old sight!