I’m on call today, so I did my usual thing of stringing together two routes, one north of home, one south – so as not to stray too far from base.
I had in mind doing 30-35. Started with a trip up through Melbourne. I was thinking of going over Swarkestone Bridge from there and going to Stenson like I did a few weeks ago, but I didn’t. I took a right through Kings Newton past Donington race course to Isley Walton, and from there down through Belton, Griffydam and Peggs Green, where I stopped at a bench and had a modest lunch consisting of a small pork pie and two profiteroles. I would normally take an oat bar rather than cream and chocolate-based pastries, but ‘er indoors had a few left over from entertaining guests yesterday. They kept me going quite nicely.
From there I devised a route to get me over to Packington that took me through Farmtown, along Corkscrew Lane. I used to use that route quite regularly back in 2015 but it fell out of favour; probably because the wooded section just north of Farmtown is not really road bike territory. Very twisty, with sudden ups & downs.
Anyway – I went down nearly as far as Twycross, then took the very pleasant and secluded Bilstone Road over to Bilstone. Came back from there through Shackerstone, Burgoland, Swepstone, Heather.
Ended up having done 40.84 (I knocked off 0.03 for a small amount of walking over roads and grass verges to benches etc) but I was quite encouraged by the state of my knees, they seemed to do fine. Pleased about that as I thought I’d given myself a setback a couple of weeks ago. It my well be that having two days off helped, as well. But I’ll see how they feel tomorrow.
A bit blowy, but warm and intermittently sunny.
I fancied a trip out on the Cannondale really, partly to make sure all’s well with the new stem bolts. But I wanted to give the X’s new bike computer a test drive and check the calibration. It reported 40.61 miles at the end of the ride, compared to the Garmin’s claim of 40.87. More than acceptable of course. But my calculator tells me that if the wheel circumference value was set to 211cm instead of 210 it would have reported 40.80, which is obviously closer. So I’ll do that.
I came up behind possibly the most heavily-laden cyclist I’ve ever seen, struggling up a hill near Isley Walton. He had a large backpack on with two additional packs, one attached to either side of it, possibly a sleeping bag and a small tent. He also seemed to be wearing dark brown tights under his shorts which I thought rather odd given the weather, until I realised that he was black.
Nothing but golf on 5 Live so I listened to 6 Music. Quite an interesting programme featuring space-themed music and a discussion between Brian Cox and Brian Eno, to mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.
A lot of cyclists out today, often with a swanky bike and all the gear but carrying a lot of extra personal weight. What do these people think their expensive racing team jersey looks like when it’s struggling to contain a big gut spilling out over the waistband of their shorts? And if you’re serious enough about cycling to invest in a carbon frame, top brand helmet and all that, why wouldn’t you try to get your weight down a bit?
Anyway – mostly made up as I went along and no new roads, but a nice run out. And that takes me to 207 this month. I think another 100 before August should be doable, looking at the weather. Having said that it might actually be too hot to ride a bike far on Tuesday, round here anyway.
