I’ve been very lucky in securing a place on Deloitte RAB (Ride Across Britain) which is a 9 day, 969 mile cycling challenge from Lands end to John o’groats!
As this means I now have a charity fundraising target of £900 I thought I’d better make a start on my campaign and put out a plea for help!

I am supporting Launchpad – a charity to prevent homelessness in the Reading area – and my fundraising page is:

https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/OliverCronk

I often feel guilty when passing homeless people but it turns out that in many cases simply giving hand-outs doesn’t help instead supporting charities such as Launchpad is far more effective.

I’d really appreciate your support in helping raising funds for this worthy cause. Even if its just a couple of quid – it all adds up!

Whilst I am a keen cyclist I’ve been training all through the winter (which has been pretty cold at times – as per the picture above!) as this kind of endurance event requires proper prep!

Thanks for reading and any support!

Oliver

Just realised I have been blogging for 10 years this month! Including a post about AI that is really pertinent today. Particularly when you think about how elections are have recently been influenced by AI and social media meta data.

I’ve mostly moved to using LinkedIn and Medium – write a lot less than when I was a hard core geek as I have less time these days.

I really need to update the look and feel of this site (as it is based on a 10 year old template it is not responsive or HTML5 based). But it is not exactly at the top of my to do list!

We raised £2,249.23 for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity which we are really pleased about – thank you so much for your generous support. http://www.justgiving.com/oxed

Annoyingly the distance we covered was half a mile short of 400 miles!!! Here is a nice overview map of the route generated by VeloViewer.com

So the 2016 charity cycling challenge is Oxford to Edinburgh – 400 miles over 3 days! Originally we (Anthony and I) were going to attempt to do it over 2 but we looked at the route and decided that was too crazy – doing it over 3 days will still be very hard – day 3 will be particularly hilly.

We are raising money for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity (who we fundraised for in 2014 when we did Lands End to John O’Groats) – who are particularly close to my heart at the moment as my dad recently had an operation there to remove a rare GIST tumour.

To donate please use our Just Giving Page which you can get to by clicking on this link:
https://www.justgiving.com/oxed

Here is the plan – in late May we set off:
Day 1 Oxford to Worksop just north of Sherwood Forest
https://www.strava.com/routes/4419428
The longest day at 138 miles (222KM) and 1,900m climbing

Day 2 is Sherwood Forest to Stanhope
https://www.strava.com/routes/4409732
132 miles (214KM) and also 1900m climbing

Day 3 is Stanhope to Edinburgh!
https://www.strava.com/routes/4409855
Shortest day but more hills 123 miles (199KM) and 3071m of climbing

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Really enjoyed riding around Garda earlier in the month. Mata Cycles near Salo are very friendly and helpful and I rented one of their bikes for 3 days.

Here is my .gpx file from last years RideLondon 100 in case anyone wants the route for their Garmin. Can’t guarantee it will be the same as this year but it looks like it will be.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55541537/RL2013.gpx

Looking forward to this years event, although the weather forecast looks somewhat interesting at the moment!

Rather pleased with a few of these achievements gained during LEJOGON:

Skratch Labs Stage Race Challenge (just after completing LEJOGON)

May Monthly Training Series, again just after completing LEJOGON

Cheddar Gorge Climbing Challenge

This is quite a cool way of seeing our route, created by veloviewer.com which does great things with your Strava data.

Click for a bigger version

I think photos and videos are pretty much complete now – on the Google Photos Album here:

http://bit.ly/lejogon-photos

Real mix of crazy ones, landscapes and lovely MAMIL shots!!!

The below are the totals for the whole challenge.

For individual days and to see the actual route we took see the Strava rides on the right hand side Strava box). We did deviate a bit as we did the Cheddar Gorge route on Day 2 as it was on safer quieter roads, and on some days I navigated on the fly choosing parts of the planned route or using other roads depending on how busy / safe the road was, elevation and directness of other options etc). Also we pushed on to Dingwall instead of stopping at Inverness (partly due to Nick’s amazing effort keeping us at 40kph for 30 mins on the front during Loch Lochy straight which saw Nick take 2nd position and I take 3rd on the Strava rankings for this piece of road!!! And also the highly favourable winds helped too! And good weather allowing for full speed descending (up to 75kph) on nice dry tarmac

Day 7 ended up being the biggest day by far in terms of total combined distance and climbing. . Only exceeded in distance by day 2 and climbing by day 1.

Total Distance = 1,491km or 926 miles – 11 miles more than the route planning suggested! This doesn’t include getting to LE either.

Elevation
18651m or 61190 ft (FYI Mt Everest is 8800m so we did the equivalent of twice up Mt Everest).

Elapsed time (includes stops) TBC
Moving Time TBC

Additional Calories Burnt = 36496

You can see over the days the average speed increasing as we get ourselves more organised and disciplined. Juggling cracking on with taking in the sights was difficult at times but we started to get around this if there was a man out front – if they didn’t get nailed back then they would stop and take pictures whilst waiting for the chain-gang or paced back rider to return.

I have to say I had immense fun once we got organised. Leading out, getting Nick, Anthony and Andy up to speed and taking turns and chasing down other team members whoever was ahead at up to 45kph on the flat was a real buzz. I fear my drivetrain might be shafted though! Later in the week cruising. At around 30kph (20mph) felt almost effortless (probably the tail wind) allowing me to conserve energy for the greater good of the team (although I did have moments on downhill and rolling up and down sections where I went off for some fun as the downhills were epic and dry). Parts of the ride to Oban and down Kirkstone pass (chasing Anthony and Andy as Nick and I set off a bit later) were highlights.

The lowlight on this aspect came just after Gretna Green. I needed to stop but didn’t want to slow everyone down so I had to chase for quite some time in to adverse winds. I think it didn’t help that I tried to catch a tractor to draft which was slightly too quick for me to catch burning up my ability to kick). Also the roads were so straight (and slightly uphill / false flat) that it was demoralising that I couldn’t see the others. I got back in the end but it was hard. When I did we.came across some.guys who had ridden from Portugal with massive amounts of bags. But possibly it was a good bit of training for the later days.

Also my left knee was pretty horrendous for a couple of days pedalling from cold in the saddle was really painful, going up Kirkstone pass was nasty and I had to just spin – only just catching Nick before we got to the top once I had warmed up a bit.

More anecdotes and pictures to follow.

Thanks

Oliver