My Garmin Edge 705 broke before London-Edinburgh-London and I borrowed Ian's for it. As I didn't have the GPS on all the time on the ride I didn't think there would be much interesting information stored. However having just had a look back it's interesting to see the slow down in my pace over time on the first day of LEL.
I set off by myself due to an administrative error by one of the volunteer helpers. He asked when I wanted to start, so I said midday. Whereas everyone was supposed to start at 9am or 2pm. Thankfully there was a strong following wind for most of the day, so I didn't have as much of a disadvantage by cycling on my own as would otherwise have been the case.
As a reminder, this was the route for that first day:
London via Lincoln, and I stopped at Rich's parent's house outside York.
240 miles, starting at 12:07 and stopping at 04:44. Average speed: 14.2 mph including stops.
I'm sure that's no where near a fast pace compared to many, but I've always been interested in how I achieved that average speed as all my practice rides with friends are more like 11mph. As you can tell we're not really into performance cycling, just enjoying ourselves. I also think it was a lot faster than the later days when I was cycling with others. In fact the first 9 hours of the final day, from York south, 100ish miles and quite flat where done at 11mph average, including stops. Though one of my knees was extremely painful by then and my Achilles hurt so much I couldn't walk very well..
So why do I think the speed was better than normal.
I expect that there was less coasting along chatting happening.
The routes on the Garmin were great, and apart from a couple of wrong turns in the first mile (a bit embarrassing) I wasn't slowed down trying to navigate, even through the night.
I had been waiting for this ride for quite a long time, so there was a fair amount of adrenalin going on for most of the day.
I ate ALOT at each of the stops, so was never hungry or thirsty.
It rained for a good part of the day and night, so cycling harder kept me warmer, and the coolness of the rain seems to keep your leg muscles fresher.
Probably the main reason was having the good food stations situated 50 to 60 miles apart. You had a target to aim for and it never seemed like I was setting out on a 240mile day. It was 50 miles till the first stop, 60 miles after that, etc. You knew you would get a seat and plenty of food and drink there.
It looks like I stopped 5 times during the day. Compare that to the ride Ian, Rich and I did to York a month beforehand, where up to the 200 mile point where my GPS flew off the bike and smashed, we had stopped 9 times. That's about every 20 miles, less than every 2 hours!
The only big rides we have planned for this year is a Welsh trip in June. Winchester to South Wales on the Friday, South to North Wales Saturday, and North Wales to catch a train home from Wolverhampton on Sunday.
I think I'll make a real effort to plan a route around good places to stop every 50 miles and see if we can cut out all these little stops.
That should also help keep energy levels up. On the practice ride to York with Rich and Ian we ran out of food at one point and had to wait an hour till we reached some shops. That's never going to help your average speed.
Anyway, here are the speed and elevation charts from my Day 1 of LEL09:
The pace definitely seemed to drop later on when it got darker, colder, wetter, and I was more tired. Luckily it was also relatively flat by that point.
