https://livetrack.garmin.com/session/e332998d-54e7-4609-b53f-40c1afc27740/token/96CA16B37105996367AB225E5AFA43E

Evening/Morning all, 2 days down and 5 to go, took a big chunk of the total miles out today, running total now sitting at 244. This would have been 254 had things gone to plan, but as the title suggests we have had to change our plans, ill come to that a little later on.

Setting off from Inverness, it was overcast and a little bit chilly. I spent pretty much the majority of the first 80 miles today riding across multiple Loch’s, including the infamous Loch Ness. I think I can say, the A82 and all 124 miles of it today, were stunning. What a road to cycle on, it was very very undulating for the first 80 miles, then it was long climbs and long decents. The views were spectacular, riding along the lakes and then hitting one of the summits in the climb, where they go skiing.

My saddle sore was a little worse first thing this morning, giving me a little trouble throughout the day. Add to that some nipple sore from riding in the rain yesterday, I was not in a good place.

I saw a couple of cyclists today (over took them), managed to chat to one of them who was French, yet spoke good English, he puffed his cheeks when I told him where I had come from and how far I had to go. The second guy I saw was clearly German and only shouted his destination at me, I didn’t even really understand that to be fair. A German pronouncing a Scottish location, what chance would I have.

On my way to the first stop I had a massive panic, a leaf (yes a leaf), blew towards me and I sh*t myself! Thinking it was a rock, piece of metal or something that was going to cause me harm. It goes to show that you have to keep your whits about you. Having to concentrate for 8 hours worth of cycling is some challenge! I manged to beat the support car to my first stop, added another 3 miles before they caught me. Stopping beside another Loch for a cheeky sarnie and refuel.

The weather changed throughout the day and the final few hours it was glorious sunshine, clearly you can see I was cycling with the sun coming in from the West as my right arm t-shirt tan is ridiculous compared to my left.

As I mentioned earlier, we have had to revert to a Plan B tonight, the final 17 miles of the A82 were shut, there was a fatal accident earlier today in which a German motorbike rider was killed. Apparently the 4th accident in the last week on that stretch of road. The highway patrol allowed us to go through the closed road until we reach Ardlui, roughly 9 miles from my original destination Arrochar. We had to make a decision, either wait until the road opened, which would be around 19:30 or 20:00 (it was 17:00 at this time), or we try and book a room in Ardlui for the night and add the extra miles to tomorrow’s ride. Option 2 was picked, which means I now need to get myself to sleep and crack on early doors. Next time I report in will be for the next livetrack!

Here are the stats from today’s ride.

124.66 miles
8:00:16 riding time
32 mph top speed
15.6 mph average speed
90 rpm cadence
5689 ft of climbing
4961 calories burnt
6 litres of water

Bug count = 5

Just had a lovely haggis and poached egg starter, followed by some salmon (rest of Mum’s dinner) and some ice cream. Tonight is our last night in Scotland as tomorrow night we look to rest our heads in Carlisle.

Wish me luck…

https://livetrack.garmin.com/session/e7890fc1-c883-432c-9eef-7a633df77c9c/token/7AD42023CF19AE6EAA90EDB12A6CD34

Day 1 is done and dusted! Let me tell you a little bit about it.

So as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, there was a killer hill that we drove down and was around 13% gradient. This hill was on my mind all night after I posted the blog post. It was still on my mind first thing, as I knew it would come around 60 miles into the ride.

Based on the length of time it took to get to Wick yesterday, I didn’t want to rush too much this morning to get going. Well that attitude came back to haunt me didn’t it. I forgot my Garmin device (yes the one that will give me all the stats over the week), we had to drive back to get it. Then once at the start, there can’t have been any signal as the Garmin couldn’t connect with my phone and use the navigation. Good thing the whole 120 miles today was on the same road! I had also forgot to apply my chamois cream first thing, so was without that for the first 45 miles!

It’s amazing just what can go through your head when you spend 8 hours cycling. I had “It’s coming home” stuck in my head all day, I get the feeling there could be more of that throughout the week!

Today was very very windy, a south easterly wind which was hitting me side on and in the face pretty much the whole day! Every time a huge lorry went past it sent me moving all over the place! Don’t think my deep rims help in those situations but hey ho.

The northern parts of Scotland is pretty much all fields with odd houses and farms scattered around, reminded me a lot of scenes from Sky Fall, especially with the overcast weather first thing.

So although the hill had been on my mind all night, when I got there, I had a nice little 10% climb to warm me up and then the 13% one. Made me think of a comment from a friend Richard Moore, keeping one in the locker. We refer to this about not going into the lowest gear and keeping one there for when you really need it. I kept one back for the 10% yet had to use it for the 13%.

Another thing I forgot to do this morning was spray myself with jungle formula, I didn’t realise how much I needed it until half way up the 13% climb and averaging 5 mph, they were everywhere! As soon as I managed to pick up speed they seemed to drop off at 10 mph! Something to take note as I go past the lakes tomorrow. You will see a bug count on my stats, this is for every bug that hits me in the face during the day. It has to be a head shot to count though! At least it wasn’t a wasp sting this time!

At 45 miles in the old folk managed to catch me up, as soon as they did the heavens opened and I got soaked! They said they would pull into a lay by and put the kettle on. Well 2.5 miles later and 5 decent opportunities to stop, I eventually find them! Typical Dad thing!

As I write this blog, we have been out for dinner, I went for Lamb, we are now back in the hotel room where both of Mum and Dad are snoring like it’s going out of fashion. There was me thinking I was meant to be the one tired! I am feeling ok, legs feel very heavy at the moment, think I may have pushed it too hard trying to catch up on the delay from this morning. Garmin tells me to have 4 days rest, well I got 12 hours so….

Here are the stats from today’s ride.

120.3 miles
7:43:02 riding time
31 mph top speed
15.6 mph average speed
91 rpm cadence
5731 ft of climbing
5762 calories burnt
5.2 litres of water

Bug count = 7

I also took note of the food that i managed to consume along the way, porridge with honey, weetabix protein shake, salted peanuts, 2 chocolate digestive biscuits, 3 energy gels, ham and cheese roll, omelette, beef pie and 2 bits of malt loaf!

I am now getting myself an early night as I want to be out on the road at 6:30 tomorrow! Look out for the live for 5!

Nessy i’m coming for you!

13 hours door to door, probably the longest car journey I have ever been on! It feels like travelling to the end of the world just to get to the start! With good intentions we thought it may take around 11 hours, but the stops to swap drivers every couple of hours meant that we didn’t arrive in Wick until 8 o’clock. We had a pretty good run up here though, every time Mum got behind the wheel we seemed to find the 50mph road works, and when Dad was driving we managed to find the slowest driver in the whole of Scotland!

At our first stop I managed to see a food stop named after the Mahabeer’s little boy Arlo, Wonder if he was named after the service station chain of food establishments? Was nice to see a familiar name though, almost like he is cheering me on.

The Lake District looks beautiful, lots of yellow fields every where with the lack of rain in so long, I must admit it also looks very very hilly! Will report back in a few days time!

Lots of support coming through today, wishing me luck on this epic challenge that I have taken on. Really does mean a lot to know that people are thinking of you. With the good luck coming in, football songs on the radio, it was a pretty good day! Although listening to the football songs didn’t fully make up for the fact that we missed the game. We had catch some of it on Talksport, luckily enough we heard the goal, slight delay as my phone was going mad at the time the corner was given, which meant they knew it was a goal before us. Then as we went further into Scotland, it was almost like the Jocks didn’t want us to hear. Not seeing the football today was only a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things of what I am setting off to achieve.

Scotland in parts looks stunning! Followed the River Garry for some time today, reminding me of my Uncle, yet another sign that people are looking out for me. So I thought the Lake District was hilly, well I am in for a shock tomorrow. Some of the hills around the east coast are humongous! 13 hours sat down today, probably not the best prep!

So as I write this blog, the hotel has a football team celebrating a cup final win, and a hen do all going on at the same time. They were celebrating every Croatia penalty like it was one of their own scoring! How much sleep will I get tonight I wonder!?

So the bet was, if I managed to get to 50% of my target before I started I would shave my legs. Well, I am currently only £128 away from 50%, if I can get to that total tomorrow then I will do the deed with the veet tomorrow evening when I get to Inverness.

Time to stretch and sleep now, alarm set for 6am! Let’s do this…

So it’s been in the pipeline for some time now, JOGLE 2018 started along time ago, but in essence it really begins tomorrow morning. The Spacetourer is packed with all the essentials, I have added a picture of my prep list that I created a couple of week’s ago. Packing actually started last week as I slowly started to buy the food and drink on the list, getting 40 litres of water, porridge pots, protein weetabix and what seems like 10kg of salted peanuts. Hopefully this will get me through the first few days with regards the water, I highly doubt I will eat all the peanuts, but I am sure Dad will give me a good helping hand!

I have always done a pre pack, no matter where I go. You can see my laid out clothes similar to what I did with the cycling outfits yesterday. This will be more than enough for the week, puts me to shame when I think I once cycled to Spain with only 2 panniers carrying all my gear! Evening clothes didn’t need any thought process at all as I just grabbed a few different items to get me through the few hours. My cycling outfits however didn’t take much prepping or planning in terms of colour, but did it terms of padding. Like most things in life, as my Grandad used to say, “if it costs more it must be better”, be like “you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. Well similar can be said for bib shorts. I have had a few pairs in my time that are ok for shorter rides, say 30-40 miles, but when you need to spend 8-9 hours on a tiny hard saddle, you want something that’s going to give you a little bit of cushion. So I tried a new make that caught my eye, Rivelo. They do different styles and cuts, obviously material comes into it and I ended up going with a couple of pairs of their Honister short. Cycling equipment is not cheap, luckily I use Sportpursuit website to buy them in the sale, but still didn’t get change from £100 for the pair. Tried and tested on my 100 mile rides I have completed in training, so fingers crossed they get me through this week.

Before I wrote this blog the support car needed a name. My Dad, who also named my bike (Camilla), has decided to name her Florence. Now I thought this was based on Florence and the Machine, with yours truly being “The Machine”. Well no, it has a deeper meaning than that, Florence Nightingale, based on the support she gave, and hopefully the spacetourer will be that support for me over the course of the week. Picked up today she had only 8 miles on the clock. Well tomorrow will see her put on sum near 700 miles in a single stint. The alarm is set for 6am, up, shower, breaky and go. It will probably take us somewhere between 10-12 hours to drive up to Scotland. We are heading to a village called Wick, sitting on the east coast of Scotland and leaving us a final 20 minute drive to John o’ Groats on Sunday morning. It looks highly unlikely that I will get to see any of the football tomorrow, unless we can get some decent signal and manage to get it working on the iPad in Florence on the way. It’s no problem though, will get to see England play again on Wednesday in the semi!

That’s all for tonight, time to get some sleep.

Goodnight all

With 5 days to go until I set off to cycle the length of Britain, I thought it was time for an update on what’s been going on and what I have left to do before Sunday morning.

Route

As most of you know in prep for this cycle ride I had to book hotels in both directions so that I could leave the decision until as late as possible based on the wind conditions. I will provide a more in depth update on the weather later in this post. So the decision has been made, as per blog title “JOGLE” is on! I will be cycling from the most northerly point of Britain to the most southerly point. Now everyone that has this ride on the bucket list, or anyone that has completed the ride always say the standard joke, “well its all downhill isn’t it”. I know this is an old saying but there is something psychological about cycling in the other direction and feeling like its all uphill. So I will be taking about little win where I can as no doubt it will be something I think about daily during the ride. The main other reasons I have picked to start up in Scotland is based on weather, scenery and ease of commute back. Apparently John o’ Groats has little to nothing on offer, so the thought of finishing up there was always a negative one. Another couple of contributing factors is the scenery on offer as I head through Cornwall, really looking forward to the final 120 miles or so from Okehampton on the 14th July (feel free to come say hi if you’re near by). Finally, the distance to drive home, getting to the start point will probably consist of a 10 hour drive, something that we would rather do on the way up rather than the end. Land’s End to home will be half that time on World Cup Final day, will I make it back in time to see England lift the the trophy?

Weather

When planning this ride and booking hotels in either direction, the main reason was due to the wind conditions. Now the met office forecast only goes as far as 5 days, so I have been monitoring this daily across the last couple of weeks to see if there was any pattern to the wind direction, the answer is no! The wind swirls round the island and tends to come and go in either north or south direction. So I decided to message the met office and see if any of the team could predict further than the 5 days online. They responded and told me they couldn’t predict further, although did confirm that based on the current hot weather the wind is likely to be less than normally and very light. This has made me feel a little more comfortable with the idea of starting in Scotland. The weather forecast for the next 10 days is looking hot, hot, hot! Even in Inverness where I settle at the end of day 1 is a whopping 22 degrees, there was me thinking Scotland had potential to be cooler and that ill need arm warmers and a gilet! The rest of the ride looks to be high 20’s for the whole time, sun lotion is at the ready.

Training

My training has been going well, having to include additional swim sessions and runs due to Alpe D’Huez triathlon at the end of the month, it hasn’t been all pedal power. My legs are feeling a little heavy today though post a weekend of run and cycle, so I may need to re think my planned run this week as I was meant to get up to 10km. I will be discussing this with my masseuse tomorrow to see what is best. These final few days will include a couple of swims, watt bike session, little run and World Cup viewing.

Prep Time

This may well be my final blog post prior to me getting to the hotel on Saturday night. The rest of this week will consist of me planning my routes for each day, packing clothes and giving Camilla a little clean. I have already been to the supermarket and bought some essentials for the trip, 50 litres of water purchased, massive bag of salted peanuts and multi bag of Haribo, along with my typical ride nutrition powders and gel shots. Now to just prepare for the long car journey up north on Saturday, and fingers crossed look for somewhere to watch England win a Quarter Final! #itscominghome

So here it is…

Over the course of the last few week’s I have been reviewing other blogs to understand as much about the proposed route as possible. I used a few different blogs to decide on my route, one of them was a 6 day cycle and the others are 10 days. Using these to see which actual route they take and then plot my 6 night 7 day cycle route along a similar path. This was a massive help as I started working from Land’s End heading north, although I do intend to ride south from John o ‘Groats, the route for the best part will be the same in either direction. As I know the average distance each day needs to be around 130 miles, I originally looked at Tiverton for my first stop, however when I read through a few more blogs I found out that Cornwall is a lot more steep than meets the eye! Most of the 10 day routes stop in Okehampton, so I decided to follow the trend and have either a shorted first or last day at around 112 miles. The rest of the miles will have to be made up during the middle days on slightly “flatter” terrain.

So as it stands I have booked all the hotels for the trip, this includes bi-directional booking. Using Booking.com I used free cancellation as one of my filters so that I have up until the week before I go to cancel hotels for the route I opt out of. This decision will be made based solely on the direction of the wind, no one wants to spend 7 days riding into a head wind! Fingers crossed the wind reports are accurate as I could end up with egg on my face!

Day 1 – John o ‘Groats to Inverness

Day 2 – Inverness to Tarbet

Day 3 – Tarbet to Carlisle

Day 4 – Carlisle to Warrington

Day 5 – Warrington to Ross-On-Wye

Day 6 – Ross-On-Wye to Okehampton

Day 7 – Okehampton to Land’s End

Although my end points for each day are defined, I am yet to go into the finer detail and plan each day’s cycle route. I used Strava to map this out whilst working on the route for hotel booking. However I will be creating each route and loading them onto my Garmin Edge 1030 over the next few weeks. Strava has a cool feature that allows you to choose a route by most popular roads and also with minimum elevation (something I will be making most use of). The current route is looking to range anything from 910 to 950 miles, which will be around an average of 130 miles per day.

Those of you that want to make a donation, head over to my fundraising page for more information.

So its been locked in, I am returning for another solo cycle event covering a different part of Europe. John o’ Groats to Land’s End will be happening in July 2018, setting out on the 8th July and cycling the near on 1000 miles in a total of 7 days, finishing (aiming to) 14th July. This has been on the cards for some time now and something that I have always wanted to do. After cycling to Spain 8 years ago, I gained the bug for touring. This will be slightly different as I intend to almost double my daily average miles to 144 in order to complete the ride in just 7 days!

I have picked July for the month to set off as the days will be long and hopefully the weather will be dry (jinxed it now). I know, I know, this clashes with the World Cup, now the last time I did this I left the day after the World Cup Final. This time, judging by England’s previous performance in the Euro’s I dont think ill be missing many England games as its Quarter, Semi and Final week whilst I am away.

You may also notice that i have gone for JOGLE and not LEJOG, let me tell you a little bit behind my decision to do this. A lot of previous blogs state that in the summer the British Isles have a southerly wind that makes LEJOG (Land’s End to John o’ Groats) the easier of the routes. Yet when I read through them all I hear is how they had a head wind the whole way! So I am keeping my options open and will be planning routes for both directions in case I have to make a last minute switch in direction.

I wont be going full solo on this ride, I have a support car driven by Mum and Dad, although I don’t expect them to get up and set off at 6am like I plan to. They will be there to keep me hydrated and fed throughout the day as I will be cycling for 10+ hours a day. They will also have the job of running my the ice bath each night in my aim to recover quickly!

So now its time to pick up the training, did a 70 mile ride at the weekend and plan to head out again this weekend for back to back rides. I will also slowly start to add the odd commute into work, building up to a few 100 mile rides in the bank before June comes to an end.

More to come as I get my actual route confirmed and start booking up the B&B’s for the week.

So for now I will let you check out the rest of my blog, maybe head over to the fundraising page to see what charities I am raising money for.