Categories
Road Cycling

Please support my 2018 Charity Cycling Challenge

Deloite Ride Across BritainLaunchpad Homeless Charity logoPicture of Ollie training in the winter

 

 

 

 

 

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

Categories
Cycling Road Cycling Travel

OxEd – Oxford to Edinburgh in 3 days by bike for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity

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

oxed-day1

oxed-day2

oxed-day3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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Categories
Cycling Road Cycling Travel

Cycling Veloviewer Wheel of Italy Holiday

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. italy-rides

Categories
Cycling Road Cycling

GPX file for RideLondon route

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!

Categories
Cycling Road Cycling

#LEJOGON Strava Challenge Achievements

Rather pleased with a few of these achievements gained during LEJOGON:
strava-climbing-challenges

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skratch Labs Stage Race Challenge (just after completing LEJOGON)

 

May Monthly Training Series, again just after completing LEJOGON

 

Cheddar Gorge Climbing Challenge
Categories
Cycling Road Cycling Travel

Lands End to John o Groats (#LEJOGON) cycling adventure for Charity

So I thought I’d put up some more information about the charity cycling expedition I am taking on with Andy, Anthony and Nick from the 10th May.

We are doing it over 8 days so about 115 miles a day with some serious climbing. Even with the training we are doing its going to be painful! We are doing it unsupported – carrying minimal baggage and staying in basic B&B and Youth Hostel accommodation.

Quick link to our charity fund raising page is here.

So here is the route we are planning to take each day along with the elevation profiles! Yes we are crazy! Note that Day 2/3 has changed slightly – will update the maps below when I get a moment. Route is still the same just shorter day 2 longer day 3.

Route (Click for detailed strava route) Elevation (Click for detailed profile)
Day 1: Lands End to Okehampton
Day 1
elev-d1The first day from #LE is the shortest at just over 104 miles but the most hilly (9,160 ft).
Day 2: Into Wales
lejog-day2
elev-d2Further in distance (126 miles) but still a lot of climbing (7,526 ft) and a big chunk of it to get to the B&B (a Castle).
Day 3: Along the Wales/England border
lejog-day3
elev-d3As days go a reasonably “flat” one, although still quite lumpy (5800ft)! We briefly skirmish with Wales before heading back up into England. 108 miles
Day 4: To the Lakes!lejog-day4 elev-d4Looks quite punchy! 5820 ft of climbing over 113 miles.
Day 5: Windermere into Scotland!lejog-day5 elev-d5Reasonably flat despite the stats saying otherwise! 6561 ft of climbing over 112 miles
Day 6: Island hopping!
Ride then Ferry to Arran:lejog-day6a  Then ride across the island of Arran:lejog-day6b
Then ride to Oban!lejog-day6c
 elev-d6a

elev-d6b

elev-d6c
Quite a big day in the saddle – 190KM – 118 miles and over 2,500m (8200 ft) of climbing, suspect we’ll be needing our lights towards the end of this one!
Day 7 – Oban to Invernesslejog-day7 elev-d7Most of the climbing (6591 ft) is near the end of day 7!!!106 miles for day 7.
Day 8: Inverness to John o Groats
lejog-day8
elev-d8The final push to #JOG. 6850 ft of climbing over 122 miles

Total distance = 1,474 KM or 916 miles!

If you can please do support our charities – we are riding for St Mungos Broadway (a homeless charity) and Royal Marsden Cancer (who provide world-class care for cancer patients, and undertake pioneering work in cancer research and education).

You can make a donation via our fund raising page here. All donations help motivate us to go through the pain of training and it will be good to know we have your support when we are on the road doing it!

Many thanks for reading!

Ollie

Categories
Cycling Road Cycling

RideLondon-Surrey 100 post ride report!

Wow what an experience the RideLondon-Surrey 100 was! Riding on  closed roads was such a blast. Completed the course in a much quicker time than I expected – 5 hours 3 minutes!

20x30-RLFC0271

Full pictures: http://flickr.com/gp/67554089@N00/g5ShR5/

I am very appreciative of the support that colleagues, friends and family have given me for my BHF charity fundraising. My fundraising total now stands at £532 so thank you. UPDATE: with work match funding the final total was over £1000 🙂

Some observations are as follows:

Generally really well organized, although there was a lot of moaning online about various things – like having to pre-register the days before the event etc. But I guess that is to be expected.

Quite a few people were waiting just after the depart fictif (where the waves were released but not actually timed from – that was 2 miles down the road) I guess for their friends or club mates to they could ride as a group.

I underestimated how effective my training would be and/or the effect of riding as a big group – when I originally entered I put myself down as 6hr30 but completed in just over 5hrs.

Make better use of the baggage drop off and pick up – put a change of clothes and shoes in the bag so once finished you can take advantage of the changing tents etc

There was a real split of riders wanting to complete in a fast time versus take in the ambience and not taking it (or their training/preparation) too seriously. As a result there was a bit of a conflict in latter waves (I was in wave G) as you had slower riders and people like myself trying to ride as efficiently and fast as possible by avoiding braking, cornering wide using a racing line and descending quickly. Many riders stuck to the left (ingrained in everyone from riding on public roads when open!) – in some respects this was a good thing as it allowed faster riders to overtake down the right side – but it did mean many were braking too much and having to pedal after the corners to get back up to speed.

I think due to the last point they should ask you how seriously you will be taking the ride – will you be plodding around or taking full advantage of the closed roads (and have experience of riding in larger groups) so these groups of riders can be better separated from the start.

20x30-RLBF3271

Sprinting down the mall at the end was such a buzz (although as you can see from my face I dug deep!), in fact I had such an endorphin high most of the ride to the point that I was getting quite emotional – had to calm myself down on many occasions!

Not sure how folks did it in just over 4 hours – did they not stop at all for water? I am guessing not!

For those who want to see more data on my ride:

Strava: http://app.strava.com/activities/72194864

Official Stats: http://bit.ly/cronkyrl

And there is of course still time to donate to BHF!!! http://www.justgiving.com/olivercronk

Nice Article from the Guardian on the RideLondon weekend and general observations relating to cycling:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/aug/06/cycling-ridelondon-100-ten-thoughts

 

Categories
Life Mountain Biking

Recent Tech Discoveries (July 09 edition)

Some Recent Tech Discoveries I thought I’d share:

The Good:

Windows 7 RC – writing the blog post from it – excellent OS (and that says a lot coming from me!)

Ubuntu 9.04 -What can I say – wow – is the OS market hotting up or what? Right when they said the Browser will be the O/S – we’ll we aren’t there yet (well not until Google’s Chrome OS anyway…)

Spotify – sure lots of people know about this one now but great streaming music service. Kind of like a commercial radio station where you get to choose the playlist. But native version for Linux would be nice (netbooks will make this kind of porting happen organically now I suspect??)

Bitly – specifically the Bit.ly Sidebar for your browser – very clever. You’ll notice I’m starting to use more bit.ly links in my blog posts but for Twitter they are essential.

The Bad:

ebox – Not a good move to just try and install this on a Ubuntu box (tried this at home) screwed lots of stuff up. Nice idea but if you want to try it out use a seperate box. It looks good and the concept is a great idea but I think its a bit too flawed for me right now (sorry ebox devs).

Denyhosts (prevents brute force attacks on SSH by adding IP addresses that repeatedly fail to login to a black list – in /etc/hosts.deny)  silently stopped working some time ago on my Ubuntu server (due to an upgrade of Python by the looks of things). Following the fix on this forum thread sorted the problem although I found the file you need to change is:  /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control-dist rather than the one mentioned.

The Ugly:

HMG Info Sec standards (or rather the OTT implementation of) – I probably can’t say any more or I’ll get burned in acid (its a long and painful story…!)

More posts to come. Enjoy the summer everyone. I intend to on a ride around Litchfield tomorrow – embedded Google Map to follow no doubt…!


Categories
Cycling Mountain Biking Travel

Photos from Peak District Holiday and other riding

Have been very lucky to get in some great mountain bike riding over the last few weeks. Couple of really good rides (albeit challenging and tiring ones!) in the Peaks including riding down Jacobs Ladder (which I was really pleased I managed to ride without coming off in a massive and very painful way!!).

Photos here, here (Ladybower classic ride), here (Bakewell and Chatsworth trips – not riding)

View of Ladybower Reservoir
View of Ladybower Reservoir

Couple of nice loops nearer to home with friends over the weekend (photos), unfortunately Kat came off her bike recently and has bruised herself quite badly – which she is annoyed about as is having to hide her legs in the hot weather we are having at the moment!!.

Now back to the office and the realities of work (it would be nice to just do an epic day ride every sunny day in the summer wouldn’t it?!!!)

Categories
Cycling Gadgets

Nice shot of Donnington Castle

One of my better recent shots taken on the SLR:

Taken on a recent bike ride to Donnington and Bagnor

Info on Donnington Castle here and here on Wikipedia