I wanted to do a Twycross after work. Just 22 miles or so. And old-fashioned, standard issue Twycross. I couldn’t leave my desk until 6-ish and I didn’t fancy spending the entire evening on a bike. Besides, my knees hadn’t quite recovered from speeding home to beat the darkness on Monday.
So I took the Boardman out again, at about 6pm. There seemed a slight risk of rain and anyway, I’m enjoying the way the Boardman is running on its new chain and cassette. All very positive, everything working smoothly.
Decent weather: not much wind and occasionally sunny. Warm enough for shorts. The grey clouds that loomed intermittently did not follow through on their threat of rain.
So I’d done about 17 of my 22 miles when my rechargeable DAB ran out of juice. No worries, I thought to myself – I’ll just use the BBC Sounds app on the phone. It was at this point that I realised I didn’t have my phone on me, and the pocket where I’d stashed it was unzipped.
Bugger.
I’d stopped at the Gibbet Post bench about two miles earlier so I tracked back there, scanning the road as I went. I didn’t find it so turned back homeward again from the Gibbet Post. I wasn’t going to repeat the whole 17 miles.
But as I pedalled along Heather Lane with about a mile to go to home, I noticed a mobile phone on the road in front of me, with its battery ejected a few inches from it. The battery was looking rather scarred and distressed, but the phone itself was fine! Apart from the fact that the rear cover was missing, and faint scratches to the lens filter.
I couldn’t find the rear cover. But I’ve put a spare battery in the phone now and it’s working fine. I guess I was fortunate to lose it over the first two miles of my ride, on the only stretch of road I was due to return to.
Anyway – including an additional 3 or 4 miles from tracking back, that’s 25.69, according to the bike computer. And since it recorded just 0.03 miles less than the actual distance over 40+ miles last time, that’s good enough for me.
I was using the phone to record the track so I had to synthesise one for Strava. I didn’t get the back-tracking part particularly accurate and it came in at 25.93, but I put the correct figure into the spreadsheet. I’ll adjust Strava somehow. I’ll stop recording early next time or something.
https://www.strava.com/activities/2426656721
91 this month already. Probably no more cycling until Saturday now.