Friday, April 17, 2009

Day 367

Got in from London at 1 am this morning, left the O2 at 10:20 pm -We had to leave before the end so we could catch our train home from Paddington :-(

AC/DC were awesome, but the real shocker was the extreamly excellent support band 'The Answer' - They were so good I bought their new album as we were leaving the O2.

Have a look at http://www.theanswer.ie/home.html

Our seats in the O2 were far to high and far to parallel with the stage, but the atmosphere was awesome :-)

I dont think I will 'EVER' buy seated concert tickets again!

I finaly entered the land of living again at 8:30 this morning. Even though it was hammering down with rain I thought a quick 20 mile ride would wake me up and kick me back into normality!

I cycled directly to Calne and popped into 'Peddlers' my favourite cycle shop and bought a new chain in preparation for JOGLE. Martin also sorted out the inline cable tensioner for the rear de-railier - It had become non functioning....

On my soggy return home I got changed then spent a quality relaxing afternoon replacing the head gasket on my son's car - Not bad really started the job at 1pm car running and job finished at 5:30.

Plan this evening is to go for our normal Friday swim and stop on the way home for some well earned pub tucker :-) - I may even have a pint or two of cider as well...

The cycle computer had todays very wet ride as 23.85 miles in 1 hour 32 minutes with an average speed of 15.5 mph

The RunGPS plot of the ride can be found here...

Ohhh I noticed the JOGLE countdown timer has broken :-( I guess I will remove it from the blog....

Ohhhh and Ohhhhh I was surfing around the CTC site and stumbled across Frank Kinlan's website, He to was a little on the large side and discovered cycling, 4 years ago, It is amazing the things he has discovered and the problems he has had are exactly the same as me....

5 comments:

Frank Kinlan said...

Been a busy week for me too all round. I thought of my quest as a weekly thing rather than a daily blog.Never did I think of it ending up this long and taking the direction it has.
Good luck with the trip even the women that run the spinning classes that I go to have latched on to what I've done.
I'll be adding a new cycling links section that you can go on as at the end of the day we all need a bit of feedback.
Just looked at at CTC link which is great, pity a beeb journo beet them to it. At some stage I,m going to have to pay the CTC back as it was a great time and i learnt so much from them.
Regards,
Frank.

Stuart Marshall said...

Hi John,
I came across your site from the comment you left on Frank Kinlan's site. You have done fantastically, building up steadily and the JOGLE I'm sure will be a breeze. I'm doing it LEJOG starting on 6 June so might pass you going the other way! I wish I started training sooner, but the public statement of the intention for the ride only surfaced in Decemmber.

You may want to take a look at instamapper.com. I've loaded it onto my Blackberry Bold and it works very solidly in logging and reporting real time positions that can be viewed on the web. It should work on any java phone/gps combo. I also have a Garmin 305 and upload the routes to Motionbased.

regards
Stuart

John Berry said...

Thank You Stuart

I didnt know how the training was going to go! I started early because I was the most unlikely to succeed as I was the most unfitt!

Problem is I took to cycling incredibly well, and the further I went and teh more I achieved the further I wanted to go!

I am planing to do LEJOG myself next year! I want to prove to myself there is NO easy or hard way, just luck (wind direction) and pig headedness!

Good luck with your LEJOG :-) are you planning to blog it??
I may learn a few thing for my LEJOG :-)

In terms of real time tracking, I have been using RunGPS for the past couple of months and it is logging the training well, the real time is a pain as it needs a constant gprs connection, wich even in civilisation is a pain! I have got the battery life issues sorted with high amperage batteries for my HTC Keiser and a wind turbine generator fitted to the bike, I get 75 miles on teh first battery wind turbine combo and at least 50 miles on a second battery and home made 9v battery + voltage regulator combo :-)

I unfortunately have spent all of the loose change on bikes and spares for JOGLE so no GARMIN toys for me :-(

John Berry said...

Thanks Frank.

I am amazed at how similar our backgrounds and experiences are to date!

I find the daily blog helps me get into the routine! I blog every day and only give myslef one day of from excercise (Tuesdays I play online computer games with friends)

My issue at the moment is that I find cycling to addictive... It is sometimes difficult to for a shorter hour ride on a nice day - to appease the family, when I really want to loose myself for hours!

I have also found that all of my personal challenges were achived very quickly.... I see very little improvement in myself now

I should join the local cycle club... but I like to cycle on my own terms when I want to.

How far a long did you get before you joined a club???

Problem is I like the touring, not so sure if the time trial/racing is my thing!

Stuart Marshall said...

John,
I just started blogging, but intend to update on the ride via the Blackberry. Site is:
http://stuart-in-bahrain.blogspot.com
and sponsorship is on:
www.justgiving.co.uk/le2jogtandem

Interested to hear about the wind USB dynamo. Does it work well, where do you mount it, how much does it extend the battery life?

You're in a lovely part of the country for cycling, mine is dry, dusty and the drivers are terrible.