I went for a bike ride this morning
It did not go well.
The ride itself was pretty good – found some new roads but everything else didn’t go well.
Let me explain……
For those of you not aware, when I’m not out on a training ride (and so I want “known” roads) – I’m using the veloviewer tile feature to try and make as big a square as I can. Essentially the world is divided into roughly mile wide squares – the aim is to ride through as many as you can. (Veloview have a far better explanation). I find this works for me as it means I’m plotting new routes down new roads to tick off squares.
So far I have managed to get a 23×23 grid with every ride starting at home. Today I was going to break that and get the train up to Hemel Hempstead to save riding there and back again – I had a 62k route planned which should give me another 21 tiles, and extend the grid to 24×24. So far so good.
The batteries on my electronic shifting were a bit flat from last weekend, and my rear light was also showing a red led on the charging port, so I charged them mid-week ready to go.
Having checked train times – I booked myself an off peak return aiming to be on the 8:36 from Harrow and Wealdstone – attempting to be down with the kids I bought it on the train company’s app, thinking the ticket would be electronic (we are in the year of our lord 2025 after all), but no – I had to pick the tickets up at the station – no drama – I would just allow an extra 5 mins.
So after picking up some cliff bars and a gel, 2 bottles of electrolytes, pumping up my tyres, fitting lights and batteries, I headed for the station – noticing that I only had 17% charge on my Garmin…. it might be tight, but that ought to be enough for a few hours… shouldn’t it ?
Anyway – I get to the station for the first hurdle of the day. You cannot pick up your tickets without the card you paid for them. No problem – I’ve got apple pay on my phone, and the card I used is registered (indeed I just used apple pay to pay for the tickets) – but guess what, the card reader cannot do contactless… despite it being an oyster reader too.
Turns out – you can get from the station to my house in under 60 seconds on a bike when you put your mind to it ! I grabbed my card, and made progress back to the station. Tickets acquired, and we headed over to platform 5 for a bit of a breather (I peaked at 678W heading back to the house)
1 minute before the train is due to arrive, there’s an announcement that the platform is changing….. There’s quite a few people on the platform, and we all head over to platform 3 – I’m starting to get the hang of going up and down stairs at pace in my cleats, whilst carrying a bike (maybe I should think about some cyclocross over the winter !), onto the train and we are off ! Phew.
It’s 15 minutes to Hemel, which are thankfully un-eventful, more stairs to navigate (thankfully no urgency now), and we are soon stood outside of the station, firing up the Garmin and starting the route off – battery is down to 15% – this does not look good.
As a precaution I turn off the synching with phone, and lock the display (no idea if this helps, but in my head if the display is not being checked for being pressed that ought to save something ?). The weather is pretty good today and for once I’ve got my layers right – not feeling too hot or cold. I manage to navigate the magic roundabout and heading out for the lanes.
Amazingly this route has very few off road bits – if you have ever used Garmin route planning before you will know that despite telling it you want roads, it has a weird joy at routing you down bridleways, footpaths and as many total inappropriate routes as it possible can. Today was fairly good, and it was a piece of road I punctured on, not a bridleway ! Anyway I’m digressing – the nice thing with tubeless tyres is when you puncture not only can you hear it, but you can see sealant being flung everywhere.
After my puincture experience at Les Sables d’lonne I had finally managed to track down a Dynaplug repair kit. Looks so simple in the how to use videos, and it was – the only hitch is it didn’t quite seal the hole. Not quire sure why – I need to look at it properly – but after a bit of fettling and pulling the plug gently back out I managed to seal it. Kit back in saddle bag and we were back up and riding.
By this point in time Garmin was in battery saver mode. I must admit I’m quite impressed with how well this worked – everything was still being recorded (GPS position, Power, HRM, gear selection, speed etc), and the route was still being plotted, the main thing it did was turn the display off as that’s the biggest drain on battery. When I approached a turn the display came back on to show me where to go, and it came back on when there was a “climb” (I’m not sure 750m at 3% counts as a climb, but hey ho !).
I will also admit I was getting quite anxious about routing. As a precaution I started my watch recording in bike mode – this was about tile hunting, I didn’t want to loose the tracking and thus the tiles being filled in, plus worst case scenario I could push the route to my watch and maybe navigate that way ?
For some reason I had plotted a small loop into the route – Garmin was getting confused again and where I should have turned left off the loop, it started to send be back down the loop once again Thankfully I spotted this was happening fairly quickly, turned around and picked up the route I should have been doing.
This put us heading back towards Hemel, which was good – even if bike Garmin failed, I had watch Garmin. If watch Garmin routing wasn’t working well then I could follow the old fashioned signposts. Not ideal for filling in tiles, but it would get me home.
Thankfully I started seeing signs for the railway station – I had made it. Quick picture of head unit for posterity (and to see how much power we had left), and off to find a train. Thankfully one was arriving in 5 minutes so all good.
Looking at the Veloviewer map, you can see all new tiles (the yellow ones). The bottom row of yellow are the tiles that expanded the grid – the rest are all filling in other bits ready for another day – there is a fair bit of strategy on how to expand things out, there are rides that act as building blocks to fill in other areas without actually expanding the grid on that day
We made it (just).
Just.
So what did I learn….
- Charge everything that needs charging.
- You still need to cary a card with you to collect train tickets.
- Duraplug is good, but it’s still a faff fixing punctures
- There are some really nice roads between Hemel Hemstead and Welywyn Garden City
Now I’m back home – the next route is plotted – train to Amersham, and ride down to Windsor, via Beaconsfield and a few random villages. Will it get me a bigger grid ? No, but it will extend to the West, and then I can work out if I’m heading North or South for 25×25.