For the ride and powerful voodoo

As part of my Randonneur 1000, I had to complete a 300km ride, which is substantially further than I’ve ever been in a day before (200km, which hurt alot). After 6 months of decent cycle commuting, I thought it was now or never!

And I made it! I had decided on a fairly flat route, so as not to shock the legs too much and had a mild tailwind to ease my passage. You can see from the log: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/331602043 that I managed very good moving average (for me), but stopped rather alot. Mostly this was down to the saddle rubbing, which I am currently trying to remedy with  a Brooks (more to come on that).

I stopped for longer than strictly necessary with my brother in law and his wife (I’m not sure if that makes her my sister in law?), but I was supplied with excellent home made pesto!

Most of the route was good, with little traffic, apart from around Huntingdon. It started misty, turned drizzly, but cleared up in the afternoon, which let me capture this nice scene of the fens:

The fens

and my Audax setup:

300k setup

Something that worked well (that you can just see in a plastic bag strapped to my TT bars) was an external battery for my Garmin GPS. I plugged it in somewhere around 150km and left it. It still had some charge left by the end. When it was plugged in the Garmin’s backlight was on, so taking far more power. I think with judicial use, I could have charged the GPS 3-4 times, which would potentially be more than 40 hours!

Back to some shorter rides now…