The longest day / midsummer madness #TdN

The Tour de Norfolk #TdN


Well we did it!
200 miles, 322km, a fairly decent ride by anyone's measurements?

Ivor Simon and I arrived in Cromer to be greeted by thick fog, nonetheless we set off and were on a pretty fast average pace for the first portion due to a favourable tailwind. The oft forecast rain, finally arrived at Winterton and stayed with us till our first cafe stop at Bungay - soaked through but spirits not quenched.
Earlier a slight detour in the Yarmouth area had gained us some mileage, but lost us time.

Bungay to Brandon was windy, as the former tailwind was now in our faces, but with the thoughts of lunch in our minds we pressed on. Upon our arrival in Brandon, we found Trisha, Ivor's wife had laid on a spread of sandwiches, cake, chocolate, drinks, gels, towels, blankets - the whole 9 yards! The rain long since gone, meant that it was time to shed layers and rearrange our dress!

Refuelled and knowing that the halfway point had been and gone we set off North, for the top left hand corner of Norfolk. The road between Southery and Wereham was being resurfaced so loose and interesting terrain plus heavy machinery were our adversaries for a few km's. Onwards we cycled, missing our preferred route, and ending up taking the main roads to King Lynn and Hunstanton - fairly fast sections interspersed with horrible rises in the road all with traffic thundering by!

Hunstanton, was to be our final pitstop and heralded the beginning of the home straight, a nicely timed mocha / capucchino's did the job and although it seemed a shame to leave what was a beautiful evening in Hnstanton, we knew there was a job to be done.

Needing 40 miles to hit the double century, quick calculations informed us we needed a detour to gain a couple of miles (those earlier gained miles, negated by our more direct route via Kings Lynn). So a right turn inland at Brancaster, and then back left round to Burnham Market we felt should do it. On we plodded towards Cromer - a coast road that rolls most of the way. Josh, my Nephew appeared along the road at Cley and a few other places along the way, shouting encouragement and taking the odd snap. With Cromer in sight we knew that we would be about 1/4 - 1/2 mile short of our target so waving at the welcome committee a ride down to the garage at the end of the promenade and back as in order to make the 200.

Much celebration, hugging and amazingly plans for an annual event followed before loading up cars and going our seperate ways home. Sausage and chips on the way home, made for an "ideal" recovery meal and so the longest day ended.

Shattered? - Yes but elated and proud of our collective achievement

The TdN cometh...

Tour de Norfolk
So after musing about it, "planning" the thing over beer fuelled BBQ's and a barrage of emails to arrange we are on to circumnavigate Nelson's county on Friday - It's not called the longest day for nothing!

Circa 190 miles or so starting / finishing at Cromer, we depart from the clifftop car park at 5.30am.
"We" are the normal gang of three (musketeers?) Myself, Simon and Ivor, and we will hopefully be joined by Josh (him of Norwich Paris Duathlon fame) and for the last push by Steve who unfortunately is in London in the morning but will return to Norfolk and then head out from Cromer to meet us!

It's a long way round...

Lunch is being served in Brandon, before we head into the wastelands of West Norfolk and round the top corner, and onto the home straight (well it wiggles a bit actually).

Aiming to finish 8pm-ish dependant upon conditions etc

Full report to follow

Halfway before halfway

Clocked up 5000 miles for ytd this morning, halfway towards target of 10,000, and almost a month ahead of time!
Still behind totals for last year but temps are finally up and sun is shining now, so may make hay for a month or two...?!

Suffolk Sunrise - the report

Not flat, but not what you would call hilly either, the Suffolk Sunrise offered a different century route to the Norwich 100, in unfamiliar territory.

"Sunrise" was a bit hopeful, I think we saw the sun, but not for long all day.
We started gently, as you do on such events, and then Simon got a puncture about 5 miles in, bit of a setback and took longer than planned to fix, but that did mean that from that point on we were overtaking all day, and almost didn't get overtaken ourselves!
The trio of Ivor, Simon and myself, worked really well together, taking turns to pull on the front, 3 stops in all - 2 for coffee and cake, and the middle one for lunch - a smorgasboard buffet of carbs. (Strangely we had to remove cycling shoes at 2 of the 3 eating establishments!).
The last couple of miles saw a late attempt to rain, but it held off, and although we got done by a young whippersnapper on a Trek to the end (the only overtake that stuck all day), there was enough in the tank to even go for a sprint finish at the end - hmmm wonder if anyone got that on film :-)

Finish time 5.40 and some seconds - happy with that! - and all for a great cause

Tour de Norfolk next...

Progress Report and achievements to date

Not entirely sure, but this may well be the first proper progress report for 2013...

4 months in with a target of 10,000 miles - I make that, I should have completed 3,333miles by end of April, so where was I... 3,662 - all good so far then?

Lots of challenges, for prizes and for fun around at the moment, aside from the MapMyTracks one that I won referred to in a previous post, there has also been the Velobici Spring Classics Challenge, in which I finished 31st out of 649 participants with a total of 2,613km covered - Prizes for this to be drawn on Saturday May 4th!

There was also the very similar but different Strava Classics Challenge, for which i covered 1,708km's and erned myself the badge opposite on my Strava Profile - kudos all the way!

May has now begun, and with only 11 days until the first sportive of the season - Suffolk Sunrise a 100 or so around Suffolk no less the other virtual challenges coming on stream are perfectly timed!

The Strava May Massive - ride as many km's as you can in May - does exactly what it says on the tin then!

And the People's Grand Tour Rosa (PGT Rosa) - designed to coincide with the Giro d'Italia - simply ride as many day as you can throughout the three week period May 4th - 26th - I only went and won the test event a few weeks ago! - Reputation to uphold me thinks?

Norwich Paris Duathlon

At the Recruiting Sargeant, Coltishall (ready for the off)

 I had the immense privilege of sharing the road with 2 intrepid (mad) cyclorunners on Wednesday 3rd April.

My Nephew, Josh Brighty and his mate Andy Mulligan are cycling Norwich to Paris, running the Paris Marathon and then cycling back to Norwich, all in the space of 10 days! Raising money for the East Anglian Air Ambulance.

I, plus 4 other of their friends, met them at the Recruiting Sargeant pub in Coltishall, just North of Norwich for Le Grand Depart with each of us riding a portion of the route with them to see them on their way.

2 riders had left the "peleton" by the time we were just south of Norwich to get to work, and the other 2 left us at New Buckenham. That left three of us, making the most of the lovely tailwind all the way through to Lavenham, just south of Bury St Edmunds for lunch.

Last minute bike tweaking

Brief pitstop in Tombland

Post lunch, it was time for me to say goodbye (au revoir) and begin the long lonely slog back home, predominantly wind against for 4.5hrs, meant that the average speed dropped off the edge of the proverbial cliff, and I questioned my sanity on a number of occasions but eventually arrived home, with 133 miles in the legs!

The boys are on their 3rd day now, and should be within 50 miles of Paris when they stop tonight - perfect preparation for running a further 26 miles on Sunday before turning teh bikes around for the homeward journey!

If you would like to keep up with their endeavours then you can follow them on Facebook here but more importantly, if you could sponsor them, then please click here and follow the instructions!

I love MapMyTracks!

So there I was minding my own business, innocently signing up to (another!) online tracker of mileage/kilometreage expended on one's bike - the particular website in question being Mapmytracks.


The reason I added to my expanding repertoire of online distance recorders apart from feeding my insatiable need for dissecting rides in every numerical form known to man was in order to "compete" in the Peoples Grand Tour (see previous post).

Anyhow, as part of nosing around the site, I spotted another challenge "March Miles Challenge" (Ride as many miles as you can in March) [Hint - keywords being 'Ride' & 'as many as you can'] so having uploaded 2013's rides to date, I duly signed up...

The challenge having now finished, I only went and won it and with it a Nexus 4 Mobile Phone!

Excited / chuffed - much!

Not bad just for riding a bike (well two actually) [Not simultaneously :-)]

Roll on April...

Peoples Grand Tour is a coming...

You know how you set yourself goals and then either succeed or fail at them.
Well how about someone else setting the challenge, and all you have to do is respond? - That's where the Peoples Grand Tour comes in!

Just ride your bike every day for each of the 3 Grand Tours: Giro d'Italia, Tour de France & La Vuelta d'Espana, record your results and compare yourself with others - easy huh?

Oh and there's a test event starting on Saturday 30th March, just for a week.

Who's in? I AM!!!

February already!

Where did January go?!

A mixed month weather wise - verging from mild through cold to freezing temps, wind, rain, snow, ice - you name it...

Still 650 miles for one of the UK "winter" months can't be too bad - can it?

Roster for 2013 is starting to come together:

May 12th - Suffolk Sunrise - 100ish miles in Suffolk (did you guess?)
June 21st - Tour de Norfolk - again does what it says on the tin - around Nelson's county in a day
July 20th/21st - Dunwich Dynamo - London to the Suffolk Coast before Sunrise (and then home!)

I am sure the above will be added to as 2013 progresses - got to have a focus though!

More soon...

Strava + VeloViewer + Race Shape = Statistics Obsession Satisfied!

Have been recording rides on Strava for around a year now - just the fact that every ride becomes (continues) to be a race appeals to my self competitive nature!

VeloViewer and RaceShape to name but two are other websites that take the Strava data and add additional stats / functionality to the raw info - Love it!

Below is the word cloud for my ridden segments on VeloViewer!