Category Archives: Training Rides

Training Rides

Week 2: Rollers and more parks

Week 2, the peak of our first three-week training block, has seen us introduce the wonderful and scary invention “rollers” into our biking lives and our new longest-ever ride of 60 miles.

A quick fund-raising update – a huge thank you to all our wonderful sponsors, we are now just shy of £450 raised for Friendship Works, you’re all amazing! As I mentioned last week, my employer is currently matching all donations so if you haven’t had chance yet, please do donate if you are able!

Tuesday: Rollers

The weather was horrendous on Tuesday, and as we were both very tired we felt it safer to experiment with our latest bike-related purchase – a set of rollers. A device which sits at the intersection between cycle training tools and medieval torture apparatus:

Rollers! The Elite Arion
The Elite Arion Parabolic Rollers – click to see the details on Wiggle

For those unfamiliar (and I counted myself amongst that number until recently) they’re a set of rollers on which you balance your bike. You then have to keep it balanced while pedalling. This is every bit as hard as it sounds; I’ve seen it described as being akin to riding a bike on a sheet of ice and would agree with that emphatically.

They do have some major benefits over other training tools for using your bike inside, however:

  • You just pop your bike on them and start pedalling, instead of messing about attaching skewers as you would on a turbo trainer. It’s less than a minute to set it up and get going, and they don’t wear your tyres out so no need to have special training tyres.
  • You have to pedal quickly and constantly, to avoid falling, so you get a solid workout with no chances to take a breather. This makes them great for tempo training and pretty time efficient. This also, apparently, improves your bike control skills.
  • You have to concentrate incredibly hard to balance, so it’s not as boring as other indoor cycling can be.

After some hilarity, we managed to get ourselves up and running on them and both put in a good 40-45 minute high-cadence workout. You do get the hang of it after a few minutes – my tip: if you find yourself sliding around, pedal harder and faster until the bike settles. And never, ever look down at the wheels; your brain will rebel and you will tip over. Eyes forward soldier!

Thursday: Fast

Audrey did an early-morning spin class to get her high-speed workout, and I added in a 15-mile detour for a full-length lap of Richmond Park on my way in to work. We’re not early morning exercise types (as anyone who knows us will testify), but we are starting to see how getting it out of the way early has many benefits. Early morning deer is almost better than an extra hour in bed. Almost.

As you can see from the delightful T-shape on the map below, Richmond Park is not in any useful way on my route to work, but it was a lovely ride and the park was very quiet at 7:30am. I averaged 17.6mph for the lap (keeping to the 20mph speed limit on the downhills), which I was very chuffed with. Even more amazingly, I managed to get from home, to the park, all the way around it and a mile back towards work before I hit my first red light or needed to give way. That’s my traffic karma for the year used up, then!

My route “to work” via Richmond Park – click for full details/stats

Saturday: Sixty Miles of Parks and Bridges

Our long ride this week, scheduled at 60 miles, followed a similar route to last week, so I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow. Suffice to say, we took in all the same parks (many with longer loops inside them), and managed to throw in a few extra Thames bridges too, crossing Chelsea (twice), Lambeth, Southwark, Blackfriars, and Westminster bridges during the ride.

Our lunch break (after 30 miles) was at the fabulous MacIntyre Coffee for one of their legendary (lawyer-baiting) MacMuffins and an obligatory espresso-based drink. This was a better-sized lunch than last week and we resisted the gorgeous-looking brownies and got ourselves back on the road.

The slog from Battersea Park over to Richmond Park was tough – I was getting especially tired by this point, feeling the three long weeks of training, but we still had around 20 miles to go including a substantial 1.5 laps of Richmond Park (last week we’d done just half a lap). Maybe the brownie would have been a good idea after all!

By the time we reached Richmond Park, we were starting to feel a little fresher (lunch finally kicking in maybe?), and Audrey practised her drafting skills, keeping close behind me to shelter from the headwind. This worked well as we achieved some of our fastest joint laps of the park. It felt great to hold a decent pace this far into the ride, averaging 13.6mph (vs 12.5mph on our most recent joint lap), so a substantial improvement – and this after 50+ miles! Audrey did fantastically well to haul her sit-up-and-beg style bike around at this pace, keeping up with me on my speedy road bike.

This section also included climbing Sawyers Hill twice, which is the first climb of any note on the Ride London route. We found it pretty tough, and it highlighted that we need to do much more hill-specific work in the next block of training. Particularly given that while Sawyers Hill may be the first climb, it is far from the biggest.

We wheeled the last few miles home, for a total distance of 61 miles, at an overall average of 12.1mph – one of our fastest long rides to date, and the longest ever bike ride for both of us. We were suitably shattered when we reached home – none of the “oh we could have done more” feeling from last week – but glad to have finished well and ready for a well-earned recovery week before we start pushing the distances up once more.

I used my cleats for pretty much the entire ride, and had no zero-speed cleat-related falling-over issues once again! Think it’s fair to say I’ve got the hang of them now, although by the end of six hours cycling, clipping out was hurting my left knee. You just can’t win!

The route – click for full RideWithGPS stats and data
Elevation profile – check out those hills at the end!

We’ve been playing about with our new helmet camera (a Contour Roam 2 for anyone interested), so here’s a short highlight video of this week’s long ride.

I’d recommend watching full-screen or directly on YouTube for the best quality.

The boring stats:

  • Weekly distance: 97.4 miles (Mark, not including 40 minutes of rollers), 61 miles (Audrey, not including the spinning of ~15 miles and 40 minutes of rollers).
  • Average moving speed (long weekend ride): 12.1mph
  • Moving time (long weekend ride): 5h03m
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total zero-speed falling-over-due-to-cleat-issues – Mark: 9, Audrey: n/a (clever enough not to get involved in such stupid devices).
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work, not including spinning or rollers) – Mark: 691 miles, Audrey: 566 miles.
Training Rides

Week 1: All the Parks!

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Week 1 of our training period ended this Sunday, and Tuesday saw spinning (Audrey) and speedy commuting (Mark), Thursday an extended ride home via Richmond Park, and Sunday our first successful 50 mile ride. As of this week, we’ve now completed over 500 miles of training each!

We’re also starting to ramp up the fund raising for the fabulous Friendship Works – a massive thank you to everyone who has supported us already, we’ve raised over £300 so far, with over £120 added in the last 48 hours alone. You can read all about why we’re supporting Friendship Works in our welcome post, but if you haven’t had a chance to sponsor us yet please do, they are a tiny but highly effective charity making a real difference to society and the children they help and are deserving of all the support you can give – and your sponsorship is a real encouragement to us as we train. All donations are currently being matched by my employer, so now is a great time to donate – with the matching and gift aid every £1 donated is worth £2.25 to Friendship Works! You can donate in dollars or pounds on our Just Giving page:

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Or, in the UK, you can quickly donate £10 by texting BAAA88 £10 to 70070 – if you use the text service, do remember to follow the instructions in the reply to allow Gift Aid to be claimed on your donation!

Tuesday fast

Tuesday’s rides were fairly standard for me, to and from work trying to keep up the pace between the traffic lights – let’s call it enforced interval training! Audrey had meetings that made cycling to work impossible, so she substituted in a high intensity spinning class. I also did leisurely-paced rides to and from work on Wednesday.

Mid-week deer

Our mid-length, mid-pace ride this week was out to Richmond Park on our way home from work on Thursday (scoping out a part of the route for Sunday’s 50 miles – using LCN37 then NCN4 to reach the park). This ride totaled 24 miles for me, 22 miles for Audrey, which we found quite tough on top of the 9-10 miles we’d already done to work; we were both pretty much wiped out by the end. The park lap averaged 12.7mph, not super fast but given how tired we were, not unhappy with it.

Extended ride home via Richmond Park – click for full details

Our first successful 50 mile ride – all the parks!

Our weekend ride took in eleven of London’s wonderful parks and commons. We started with the Wandle Trail as usual, which goes through King George Park (park no. 1). We then went east to Battersea Park (2) and, from there, zig-zagged back and forth over the river using Chelsea (northbound), Lambeth (southbound) and Southwark (northbound) bridges to head east while avoiding the hectic Parliament Square and Embankment. By blind luck this crazy hopping back and forth neatly avoided a host of road closures for the London 10k, which we’d been totally unaware of when planning our route.

Heading east to Tower Hill (via getting lost around the City for the second week running) we joined and followed CS3 around 7 miles to Beckton, the eastern-most point of our ride. 19.5 miles down at an average of 11.6mph and we were still feeling fresh, so far so good!

Heading out CS3
Heading out CS3

We got ourselves onto the Greenway (3) and followed it west to Stratford, at which point we promptly got lost trying to follow the Greenway diversion, adding an extra mile. Nevertheless, we soon found ourselves in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (4), then headed west to Victoria Park (5) and London Fields (6). 27.5 miles in, averaging 11.3mph, it was time for our lunch break at Broadway Market.

We rather over-indulged, sitting in the lovely sunshine eating delicious flatbreads and cakes, but we were “soon” on our way again (well, about an hour later, all said and done – it was quite a wait for food).

West via the City, Embankment, and CS8, we got back to Battersea Park (7, if you count it twice) then followed LCN37 and NCN4 through Barnes Common (8) to reach Richmond Park (9). We did a single short loop in Richmond Park and, still feeling quite fresh, did the final leg home, ticking off Putney Heath (10) and Wimbledon Park (11) on the way. Overall, 52.8 miles at an overall average of 11.7mph – with the last 10 miles averaging 12.1mph.

In Richmond Park
In the beautiful Richmond Park

This was a great ride for us for a few reasons. Firstly, we kept up the average speed well throughout the ride, with the last ten miles being the fastest of the day. Our speed on other long rides has tailed off markedly towards the end, so finishing strongly and still feeling good was a great boost. Whether due to the faster mid-week rides or the longer outings starting to add up, something is starting to feel better.

After our last attempt at a 50 mile ride ended in injury, we were also very glad to reach the distance without any major knee issues or other niggles.

Another positive was getting our food intake better organised – having a planned lunch stop saved time otherwise wasted looking for somewhere to eat and meant we ate at a sensible point in the ride (near the middle rather than the end), both of which have been problems previously. It will also have been a factor in us still having energy at the end, even with riding against a super-strong head wind for ten miles in the middle. We need to work on minimising the time taken for the break and perhaps eat a little less, but the structure seems right and the benefits of eating properly during the long rides are clear.

One final good thing: I used my clipped-in cleats for extensive parts of the day and didn’t come close to falling over at any point. Yay! Progress!

And with that, on to next week’s 60 mile long ride, the last week of this first “building” phase before we have a cut-back week to solidify our gains.

The route – click for full RideWithGPS stats and data!

The boring stats

  • Weekly distance: 131.9 miles (Mark), 83.8 miles (Audrey, not including the spinning of ~11 miles).
  • Average moving speed (long weekend ride): 11.7mph
  • Moving time (long weekend ride): 4h30m
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total zero-speed falling-over-due-to-cleat-issues – Mark: 9, Audrey: n/a.
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 594 miles, Audrey: 505 miles.
Training Rides

Week 0: Sun, speed and a Big Ride

Our training has now started in earnest. The week just ended was week zero of our twelve week plan, with a target of adding in some mid-week riding and our first formal long ride at the weekend with a target of 40 miles.

Tuesday – 25 miles with five fast

We only managed the one mid-week day of riding this week; a serious lack of sleep and me not being fully back on my game after the half marathon put paid to a second one – just too tired. On Tuesday we did a gentle paced ride to work (9 miles Audrey, 10.5 miles me) then incorporated three reasonably fast continuous laps of Battersea Park into our journey home, getting our heart rates well up and getting used to moving a bit faster on the bikes. The boring stats: 13.0, 14.3, 13.4mph respectively, for a total of 5.1 miles at an average of 13.6mph.

We found a much better route from Battersea Park to the Wandle Trail by following LCN37. It’s mostly quiet back streets and only a touch longer than following CS8 which, along here, is mostly blue patches under a busy lane of cars and buses on Battersea Park Road and York Road.  CS8 is fine at quiet times (read: bank holiday Sundays), but at the time we’re coming home from work it’s a traffic-filled hell, so we’re very happy to have found an alternative. Heavy traffic is the last thing we want after wearing ourselves out in Battersea Park.

The Big Ride

This weekend was the London Cycling Campaign’s Big Ride, a 2.5 mile cycle on closed roads from Park Lane to Embankment via the London landmarks of Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Parliament Square to raise awareness of the Space for Cycling campaign ahead of the London council elections in the coming week. Dangle a few miles of central London closed roads in front of us and we’re like moths to a flame!  So we built that into the day’s route, heading up to the start of the ride via Battersea, Chelsea Bridge and Hyde Park, with a vague plan to head east afterwards along CS3 and see where we ended up.

The Big Ride itself was a wonderful, good-natured ride with people of all ages on bikes of all shapes and sizes.  Pedestrians all along the route were smiling and waving, and the rally at the end had speakers from across the political spectrum all making the right noises, which was highly encouraging.

Yes, I really was this unreasonably excited the whole time...
Yes, I really was this unreasonably excited the whole time…

Our long ride started in earnest after the Big Ride, eventually finding the start of CS3 after bumbling around Tower Hill. This is one of the better superhighways, largely having its own dedicated space along a fairly quiet corridor. We followed it to Limehouse Basin (where the Regent’s Canal meets the Thames), then went along the Limehouse Cut towpath to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Once there, we had a good explore; the wide paths about the park are all cycleable but the on-road provision is utterly woeful. It’s very depressing that such poor cycling facilities have been built on an essentially blank canvas. The most tragic-hilarious of all is the bridge to the Lee Valley VeloPark, which has very narrow advisory on-carriageway cycle lanes.  It’s not like anyone might cycle to a velodrome, mountain bike course, BMX track or road cycling circuit, eh? It would have been better if they’d not bothered putting anything.

While pootling around, I managed to cycle into an utterly pointless bollard which had been inexplicably placed in the middle of a cycle track, luckily with no harm done other than to my pride. On reaching the VeloPark, we cycled about having a look at things then went on to the beautiful road cycling circuit, a billiard-table-smooth one mile long, six metre wide track with a great selection of elevation changes, banked corners and lovely long straights. Three speedy fun laps of that (14.4, 16.6 and 14.6mph respectively) and we decided we’d best start working our way home, before we overshot our target distance by a huge margin. After we left, we worked out that apparently you’re supposed to pay to use the road track, though honestly we have no idea how, we just followed a big sign that said road track this way and then we were out on it. Still, at £6 for an hour it’s not crazily expensive for a mile-long track for doing speed work, so we may well make our way back here in the coming weeks, and if we do we’ll put some effort into working out just how you’re supposed to pay.

We headed home via the Greenway, Victoria Park, the Regent’s Canal, then a selection of LCN routes across London ending up back on LCN37 and the Wandle Trail, for a total day’s distance of around 46.7 miles (including the 3.6 of the Big Ride which were, to be honest, as much walking on a bike as riding, and two miles back from the post-ride pub visit, so we’ll not include those in the total).

We were tired, but not destroyed, and both felt like we could have done more – which is good because next week we’ll be doing 50 miles, and at a more consistent pace too.

The 29 mile main section of our ride – click for full details!

The boring stats

  • Weekly distance: 69.1 miles (Mark), 65.5 miles (Audrey), of which 41 miles was our long weekend ride, 5.1 miles paced lapping Battersea Park.
  • Average moving speed (Battersea Park laps): 13.6mph
  • Moving time (Battersea Park laps): 34m42s.
  • Average moving speed (long weekend ride): 10.6mph
  • Moving time (long weekend ride): 3h52m
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 462 miles, Audrey: 421 miles.
Training Rides

Training Update

While I’ve been busying myself with my running activities we’ve continued with our training rides, albeit with reduced distance and intensity for me. Before we finally dive into our formal Ride London training plan, here’s a quick round-up of our rides from the last fortnight.

Week ending 4th May

Due to the tube strike, we each cycled to work twice during this week (totalling 43 miles for me, 36 miles for Audrey). On top of this, we rode up to Battersea Park on the Saturday and Audrey did many laps at a fabulously consistent pace, while I sat enjoying the sun tapering for my running and playing with the SheepTracker, our real time tracking solution being developed so all you lovely folk can follow us on the big day. We’ll have more on the SheepTracker in a separate post soon.

The SheepTracker in prototype form
The SheepTracker in prototype form

This ride was 16 leisurely miles for me,  30 decently paced miles for Audrey. And so, this weeks boring stats:

  • Weekly Distance: 60 miles (Mark), 66.7 miles (Audrey)
  • Audrey’s moving pace for the laps of Battersea Park: 11.9mph
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 326 miles, Audrey: 313 miles.

Week ending 11th May

Luckily, the second batch of tube strikes was suspended, sparing me the enforced cycling to work. After running on Monday this came as a great relief. I did cycle two days (totalling 42 miles), and Audrey cycled 18 miles around Merton on a day’s pottering. We then went to re-acquaint ourselves with Richmond Park on Sunday (where there are currently baby deer galore!), putting in some decent paced laps in the face of a strident headwind.

The headwind slowed us massively for half the lap, with the speed limit stopping us taking advantage on the other half, but it gave us a great workout. The hills are starting to get a little easier, keeping the pace up a little less hard work. Overall, a good ride to lead us into the first week of our structured training plan. We finished our laps with cakes and paninis in the café, then headed home.

Our Richmond Park ride – click for the full stats!

The boring stats

  • Weekly distance: 66.7 miles (Mark), 42.6 miles (Audrey), of which 24.6 miles was our weekend ride, 11.5 miles paced lapping Richmond Park.
  • Average moving speed (Richmond Park laps): 12.8mph (did we mention the headwind? Monstrous, it really was)
  • Moving time (Richmond Park laps): 54m05s.
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 393 miles, Audrey: 355 miles.
Training Rides

Week ending 27th April

Just a quick one this week as there’s not too much of interest to report.

Battersea Park

Our main training ride this week was another nice cycle to and around Battersea Park, of 24 miles this time. I spent much of the ride getting my saddle position right and think I’m there now, give or take. Audrey carried on lapping the park while I adjusted so whilst we did the same distance, her ride was a more sensible constant pace while mine was a series of pauses to adjust followed by sprints to catch up. Which was rather fun, I must admit. My new road bike is very enjoyable to ride at 18-20mph whereas my old hybrid, much though I love it, was noticeably harder work around those speeds.

Our route & ride – click for full details
Elevation Profile

Cycle to work

We woke to a beautiful clear blue sky on Wednesday morning which made it impossible not to cycle to work. We’d intended to mix in some mid-week cycling, and the 9 miles each way for Audrey and 10-10.5 miles each way for me (depending on which roads in the City of London are closed for Crossrail or utility work; currently: all of them) make a couple of decent rides. The ride in is usually at a reasonable pace as we’re often on the late side; the ride home more leisurely. We’ll lengthen our rides home by pulling in some of the interesting sections we’ve found on our long weekend rides as we get further into training.

Oily Hands

The rear derailleur on my new bike seems to have a narrow window for correct shifting and despite only recently having it reindexed it had gone out again. I decided I should learn to fix this myself, so followed this excellent guide (insert wiki books link) and it’s now shifting perfectly again. This would have been much easier with a work stand for the bike – as it was I rigged up a bungee cord from the rear rack to the top of a door to lift the rear wheel up. This worked, just about, but wasn’t exactly the height of ergonomic joy as the bike bounced about like crazy while pushing the pedals around. Think I’ve identified the next bike-related purchase.

Next week

There won’t be a long ride next weekend as I’ll be resting ahead of running a half marathon in Milton Keynes next Monday, with a crazy target of 1h45m.

But before that, it’s the RMT-sponsored cycling to work week, or as it’s commonly known: Tube Strike! So our midweek cycling this week will include at least two cycle-to-works. And if the RMT and London Underground don’t make up sharpish, the following week will see us cycling to work for four days straight. Nothing like a bit of industrial action to kick start our training.

The boring stats

  • Distance: 24.1 miles
  • Elevation gain: 547ft
  • Average moving speed: 12.2mph (Mark), 11.9mph (Audrey)
  • Time: 1h55m moving (Mark), 2h00m moving (Audrey), 2h30m total
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total training miles to date (including cycling to work) – Mark: 266.2 miles, Audrey: 246.0 miles

 

Training Rides

Knees rested and sea air enjoyed; time to get back on the bikes

We’ve both had some knee issues over the last few weeks – Audrey’s more acute problems appeared at the end of our last ride and I’ve had some less serious niggling pain which was probably caused by incorrect cleat positioning when I started using the SPD pedals; my left foot apparently wants to be angled out several degrees when pedalling, which I’d never noticed before – something about attaching your feet to the pedals concentrates the attention on such details.

To try to get back to full knee health (well, as full health as our knees ever get, which like most people older than 23 is simply “not hurting too much”, bloody knees) we’ve taken a couple of weeks off from major bike rides. This enforced break serendipitously coincided with a week in Devon, which included plenty of walking, hot tubbing, relaxing and actually having enough sleep. All of which feels like it helped but who’s to know without following the latest in sports injury recovery methods… Heat? Cold? Rest? Activity? No idea. But still, this:

Woolacombe Bay
Woolacombe Bay

For today’s ride, we wanted a relaxed pace and modest distance with an easy escape route home in case of knee trouble. With this in mind, we decided to cycle to Battersea Park and do a few laps there. Both the park and our route there are pretty much pancake flat, and the park’s 2 mile loop meant we could make the ride whatever length we wanted – subject to boredom, tiredness or pain. It also meant that we’re never more than six flat miles from home, meeting our easy escape criteria.

Heading up the Wandle Trail to Earlsfield on the way there, we noticed its new surface has been completed with what seems to be a tightly bonded rough gravel layer now adhered to the tarmac laid a few weeks back. Unfortunately there’s a large amount of loose gravel left on top which, whether intentional or not, makes for rather hairy cycling as you’re constantly worrying the gravel will slip and take your wheel with it, particularly on the bends. Will be contacting Sustrans (who have been doing the surfacing work) to see if they can clear this up as they assured me the finished surface would be great for cycling.

Overall it was a pretty uneventful ride, four laps of Battersea Park for a total of 20.3 miles at an average speed of 10.4mph, gentle as we intended. More importantly, Audrey had no problems with her knees and mine were feeling better than they have in a while. We’ll try and get a couple of rides like this in each week, until we start our formal training plan* in early May, once I’m done with my extra-curricular half marathon.

*doesn’t yet exist

NO ZERO-SPEED FALLING-OVER DUE TO CLEAT ISSUES FOR MARK! Ahem… Hopefully that is a sign of things to come, I’m finally getting some confidence about clipping in and out quickly and anticipating well when I need to click out. Fingers crossed.

Our route (click for full ride details)
The elevation profile – looks bumpy until you see the scale!

Just before we got home, Audrey suffered the first Team Sheep puncture, caused by an unidentified small sharp thing going through her tyre (Sustrans’ finest gravel, perchance?). Luckily as we were close to home we didn’t have to do a roadside fix, so as punctures go, not a major problem. It might be worth us investigating new tyres with slightly more puncture protection for Audrey’s bike. I use Vittoria Randonneurs on both my hybrid and road bikes which seem to be fairly bullet proof, whereas Audrey is using the decent but not super tough Bontrager Select Invert tyres supplied with her bike.

Overall ride summary:

  • Distance: 20.3 miles
  • Elevation gain: 517ft
  • Average moving speed: 10.4mph
  • Time: 2h00m moving, 2h44m total
  • Total punctures to date – Mark: 0, Audrey: 1
  • Total training miles to date – Mark: 220.0 miles, Audrey: 203.7 miles
Training Rides

Ticking off the London boroughs

Our training rides are proving a great opportunity to explore this fabulous city of ours. We’ve seen a lot of it in the years we have lived here but nothing brings it all together like pootling around on a bike. You also get to see the interesting bits between the ‘places’ – the areas you normally just slide under on the tube.

It’s also good to use these early long rides, where we are not too concerned about pace, to find the best places to cycle good distances so we can build up a library of sections without too many interruptions that we can combine into training routes. Richmond Park is great, but we don’t want to be going and lapping that four times a week!

This week’s long ride took us to a number of London landmarks that we’ve not previously been to. We planned the route beforehand, targeting breaking the 50 mile barrier for the first time. The theory: a scenic route to Greenwich, under the Thames via the foot tunnel to the Isle of Dogs, head north to the Olympic park then east out along the Greenway to the Woolwich Ferry. Taking the ferry south of the river, we’d head via the Thames Path and Greenwich once more to CS7 – our usual cycle route home from work.

The plan

We started very strongly – a good pace along the Wandle Trail and up to Battersea Park for a lap there. This stretch definitely makes it into the list of useful segments for our rides, little interaction with traffic and mostly a sensible amount of space to ride, meaning a decent pace is relatively easy.

As with last week, we headed along CS8 on Millbank, but this time we crossed back over the river before Westminster to avoid Parliament Square (it’s very scenic and all but an utter cow to cycle around). Coming off the bridge, I went to go through some traffic lights on amber and looked back to realise Audrey wouldn’t make it through the lights, so stopped suddenly with no chance to unclip, giving me my only zero-speed falling-over due to cleat issue of the day. Still not there…

We stopped off at Kerb (an excellent roaming street food market) who were set up behind Royal Festival Hall and got some fabulous cakes from Kooky Bakes – ‘Born in the States. Baked in Britain’. The American sheep among us wasn’t going to turn down an Oreo peanut butter brownie or anything resembling a seven layer bar. Highly recommended by both of us and great cycling fuel!

Heading through Southwark was slow going – the route we had planned went through some tourist-heavy areas which were very busy with pedestrians so we attempted to divert around but ended up in the middle of Borough Market – also rammed full of pedestrians. It didn’t improve much from there until we managed to get back to our planned route at the far side of London Bridge – which took several failed attempts that ended in dead end streets or one-ways in the wrong direction. Even once we rejoined our route, some of the cycle route (NCN1 again, I believe) was simply laughable, with bone juddering cobbles and so many left and right turns.

After what seemed like an age of this (in reality it was probably just a few miles), and pretty depressed about our route choice, we reached Rotherhithe where Audrey had suggested we take the road around the perimeter of the peninsula instead of cutting across. This was a great idea, as the road is wide and nicely surfaced but has little traffic as there’s no reason to want to drive there unless you’re a resident. We headed through the pleasant Russia Dock Woodland and then continued on our way towards Greenwich.

After a brief stop for some of our cake, we said a quick hello to the Cutty Sark in Greenwich then walked through the foot tunnel to the Isle of Dogs. Thankfully the lifts at both ends were in operation! We continued to follow NCN1 on the north of the river, which once again was leaving no junction left unturned – another endless sequence of lefts and rights which made for very frustrating cycling. This slow process eventually brought us up to the bottom of the Regents Canal just north of Limehouse Basin where the canal meets the Thames, and we were finally able to stretch our legs again along the towpath to Victoria Park.

We picked up some baguettes and ate them in the park, trying to learn from last week’s failure to eat early enough during the ride. Even so, it was still nearly 4pm and we were only just having lunch, so arguably we still haven’t got this right. At least we had kept ourselves better topped up with cake and Haribo before lunch this time.

A lap and a half of Victoria Park then we reached the fabulous Greenway – the best use of a sewage outflow you’re likely to see. For those unfamiliar with it, the Greenway is a linear green corridor with a wide paved path running from Victoria Park in Hackney out 4.5 miles east to Beckton, and other than fairly occasional road crossings it is pretty much interruption free*. It runs on top of the enormous Northern Outfall Sewer, part of Joseph Bazalgette’s grand Victorian sewage system for London, which takes the capital’s crap far enough away that it can be discharged into the Thames without the tide bringing it back into central London. These days it is, thankfully, cleaned and treated at Beckton before being dumped in the river. Near the start of the Greenway is the delightful-looking (no, really) Abbey Mills pumping station which hefts sewage up 40-odd feet from the underground sewers which run along the Embankment to the height of the northern outfall. Anyway, enough of this crap – I assume you’re mostly here to read about cycling or charity or us, not sewage infrastructure geekery.

* Interruption free, aside from a short but awkward temporary gap when you reach Stratford (Crossrail works, according to Open Street Map), necessitating a walk through a temporary diversion really not set up for cycling, and a short stretch of the segregated CS2 Extension which was interesting to see in the flesh, along Stratford High Street, before rejoining the Greenway.

We made our way to Beckton on the Greenway and reached what we thought was the end – a rather major intersection of the A13 and A117 dual carriageways. Thankfully there was, at least, toucan crossings so we didn’t have to play with the nine lanes of cars. It took a while to negotiate all the crossings – fine for a leisurely ride but must be very annoying for anyone doing it frequently. We took a short stretch of CS3 (I had no idea it got that far east) then back on the Greenway for a surprise last few hundred metres which were severed from the rest by these major roads. There was some evidence that it once connected through but it appears to be very closed now, whatever that route was.

From the end of the Greenway, we followed a good (but wouldn’t want to do it alone or at night) off-street cycle path down towards the Woolwich Ferry. The cycle path eventually became a narrow cycle lane at the side of a busy main road, then nothing at all. Luckily the footpath over the huge road bridge out past London City airport to the ferry terminal is shared space as that did not look like a nice road to cycle on – heavy with fast moving traffic and zero space to escape to. There is also a cool point about two thirds of the way across the bridge where you are absolutely in line with the runway, with the landing lights both in front and behind you.

There was an enormous queue of cars for the ferry, which the British part of me felt rather bad about cycling past, but presently we made it on to the ferry and over the river: another bit of London infrastructure ticked off the to-do list. The ferry was fun and cycling onto/off it was fine; I wouldn’t exactly say it was set up for cycling though – you use the area set aside for motorbikes and have to ride off in front of all the cars. Fine for reasonably confident cyclists as we are; not so sure it would work well for a family though.

Once south of the river, we began tacking back west along the Thames Path, which was variously very good, or middling, or on more than one occasion entirely missing. Overall though, for much of this stretch it is very good for cycling along – wide enough to easily coexist with the few pedestrians out that way without having to pootle too slowly.

Along this stretch, we went by the Thames Barrier, which protects central London from flooding by preventing the tide flowing up the river at times of high water flow, another thing we’d been meaning to see for years. We used this opportunity to have the last of our cake and snap a few shamelessly touristy photos.

Mark at the Thames Barrier
Mark at the Thames Barrier
Audrey at the Thames Barrier
Audrey at the Thames Barrier

Disaster strikes

Continuing on, the loop around the back of the Millennium Dome O2 continued the decent quality track, until it eventually degenerated into a building site. Around this point, Audrey’s knee started giving her major trouble. We’d done about 40 miles at a relatively sedate pace, so we will need to work out what caused this. More pressing, however, was the quandary of how to get home, some 15 more miles by our planned route. The main options we could think of were to limp back home very slowly (taking hours and risking further injury), or to try and shortcut our way back to somewhere we could take a train from.

We weren’t far from Greenwich, but the train options from there weren’t very helpful, so we ended up tacking back across to Southwark very slowly (nevertheless, still adding another 8 miles), where Audrey was able to leave her bike at work and tube home; I cycled the remaining 9 miles home from there via CS7, Clapham and Wandsworth Commons, and the Wandle Trail (which was like cycling while being pelted with a thick hailstorm of rice as it had so many swarms of flies hovering around it). By the time I made it home my hair was storing more insect life than a Venus fly trap with the munchies.

In Summary

The final route
Elevation profile

Overall, a mixed bag of a ride. The good: some good bits of route found, several landmarks visited, some awful bits of routes found (good to know to avoid in future), our longest rides yet (even Audrey’s curtailed 48 miles were a few miles longer than our longest previous ride). The bad: those awful bits of routes really weren’t fun or fast to cycle, Audrey’s knee troubles are a concern that we’ll need to get on top of pronto, and the overall pace even up to that point was very slow other than the first stretch.

Overall ride summary:

  • Distance: 48 miles (Audrey), 57.3 miles (Mark)
  • Elevation gain: (check)ft (Audrey), 1,937ft (Mark)
  • Average moving speed: 10.5mph
  • Time: 5h28m moving, 8h26m total
  • Total training miles to date – Mark: 199.7 miles, Audrey: 183.4 miles