Did my first 400km ride yesterday: Edinburgh to Berwick upon Tweed via Dunbar and Pease Bay, Berwick to Longtown via the Chain Bridge and the B6357, Carlisle home with Ride to the Sun (or not, see below). Left at 0545 on Saturday and back at 0530 on Sunday.
High points:
# The weather. What a glorious day (and night) to be on a bike
# The scenery. Much of the route between Berwick and Longtown was new to me, and it was a glorious place to be on a bike.
# Decathlon salted caramel energy gels. I only had two, as treat, but they are like squeezing liquid toffee into your mouth. Every other flavour of their gels is, in my view, vile. These are heavenly.
# Tesco fruit bars. Cheap real food, but full of carbs (and impossible to open)
# McDonald's 85p hamburgers. They are very nice cold.
# Seeing a big owl fly silently past in the dark, and watching an oncoming cyclist narrowly miss being hit by a buzzard.
Low points:
# The state of the A701. I'm sure it's got rougher.
# cycle.travel making some 'interesting' routing choices, and me not noticing them earlier. It really can be a bit dense sometimes.
# Totally miscalculating how long it would take to get to Carlisle, so setting off home at 9pm, and being one of the very last on the road. I hoovered up a couple of stragglers, but mainly had the roads to myself.
# That's it, really.
I spent a bit of the ride working out when I can fit in a 300km and 600km before the end of September (and then doing the mental maths to see if I could actually manage the latter). This helped keep me awake as I insist in measuring my performance in miles, but audax seems to work in kilometres.
Anyway, as per bill's post elswhere, CCE is a truly magical place where we are encouraged to try new things and where, bit by bit, things that we once thought were impossible become quite ordinary.
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