I think I’m almost back to being able to run now, although I have dropped in fitness slightly. Here’s my race plan for Spring 2012:

• Tue 10 Jan – SLOW Marylebone Street-O
• Sun 15 Jan – MVOC Holmbush
• Sat 21 Jan – EUOC Edinburgh City Race
• Sun 22 Jan – EUOC Holyrood Park
• Thu 26 Jan – CHIG Victoria Park Street-O
• Sun 29 Jan – BKO Concorde Chase?
• Thu 2 Feb – SAX Sevenoaks Street-O
• Sun 5 Feb – DFOK Chelwood
• Tue 7 Feb – SLOW Brockley Street-O
• Sun 12 Feb – CHIG Claybury
• Sun 19 Feb – CompassSport Cup Qualifier
• Sun 26 Feb – SLOW Wimbledon
• Sat 3 Mar – St Andrews Scottish Sprint Champs
• Sun 4 Mar – St Andrews City Race
• Sat 10 Mar – Varsity Match at Burnham Beeches
• Sun 11 Mar – Varsity Match Relays
• Tue 13 Mar – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 18 Mar – DFOK Mereworth?
• Wed 21 Mar – Possible Munro trip
• Sat 24 Mar – British Sprint Championships, York
• Sun 25 Mar – British Middle Championships, near York
• Sun 1 Apr – Waltham Half Marathon
• W/e 6-9 Apr – JK, Scotland
• Tue 10 Apr – SLOW Street-O
• Sun 15 Apr –
• Sat 21 Apr – JOK Chasing Sprint
• Sun 22 Apr – Back to London to help at the London Marathon?
• Sun 29 Apr –
• Sat 5 May – British Championships, Lake District
• Sun 6 May – British Relays, Lake District

The book details all the major roads in Scotland (115 years ago – so no motorways or city bypasses!) with a subjective description of the road, a list of key gradients and sights, and an altitude profile. The Scottish Mountaineering Club reviewed it in their fourth edition (September 1896) and were encouraged that it could be used to relate cycling and mountaineering.

I was pleased to see route 157 (Oban to Crianlarich) is “Class II [an ordinary main road]. The first 8 miles of the road are good.” Thankfully I’m not going further along it though, as it continues: “Thence to Tyndrum is a fearful road – grass and loose stones”. The book suggests a 1/13 gradient 3/4 mile from Oban will be my main concern, and that I’ll encounter Dunstaffnage Castle as a “Principle Object of Interest” after 3 miles. The section concludes with the encouraging comment that “The scenery on this road is very fine”.

Here is a copy of the accompanying altitude profile, from the 1898 online version on the Internet Archive:

Picking out one more route – 298 (Inverness to Fort Augustus), the guide writes that “the road gets worse and worse, and after Whitebridge is a loose mass of stones, with very steep hills… at times the surface… is little better than a watercourse… These hills of are course highly dangerous… the scenery about Foyers is very fine”. I cycled this route on Day 2 of my John O’Groats to London challenge and can indeed vouch for the scenery at Foyers.

There are some evocative advertisements from the time – one for the Cockburn Hotel which is “adjoining Waverley Station” in Edinburgh, and offers “Passenger Lift” and “Electric Light” but “No Intoxicating Drinks”. The Pneumatic Brake Co Ltd of Manchester has “Tips to Tourists” where it quotes the book it is in – “Hills are not generally regarded as dangerous to descent until they are 1 in 15, and with anything steeper the danger increases” – by adding “If you desire to desire to descend hills of the above description with ease, safety and comfort, send your Cycle to the nearest Cycle Agent to be fitted with a Pneumatic Brake which can be done in a few minutes”. Good to know.

There is also a section with maps of Scotland, the most eye-catching difference is there were many more railway lines in Scotland 115 years ago than there are now…

Back from a proper holiday – not one involving running around forests or walking up hills, rather one visiting castles and vineyards, and even a bit of fine dining. It was a trip to the Loire with a friend, Nick. We got the Eurostar from London and then the TGV from Paris to Tours. The following day we picked up a hire car and gradually headed west, via Loches, Decartes (renamed after its most famous resident), Villandry, Bethenay, Chinon, Saumur and Behuard, to Angers. The wine caves at Saumur were a particular highlight, although we did supplement our wine haul here with more at the Le Clerc supermarket at Brissac-Quince. Loches was also a particularly beautiful place!

Some pictures on Flickr:

I’m currently in Scotland for the extended Easter/Royal Wedding/Bank Holiday break, and have been taking advantage of the current unusually fine weather – and a special cheap train fares deal – to make multiple excusions up into the Highlands to indulge in a spot of Munroing – climbing a few of the 283-odd peak in Scotland that are over 3000 feet and so become “Munros”. So far I’ve been twice up on the West Highland Line to Loch Lomond and to Tulloch, and tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I’ll be up in Glen Tilt tomorrow.

If you are ever travelling on the West Highland Line, which by some measures is the world’s most scenic railway, I recommend sitting on the left going up – or the right going back down. With the exception of the Loch Lomond section, the views are generally finer on that side. Particular highlights are the elevated views over Loch Long, Loch Lomond, Loch Tulla and Loch Trieg, and to several of the many mountains – The Cobbler, Ben Lui and Beinn Dorain to name but three. The Cobbler is too low to be a Munro itself, but its three thrilling summits (one requiring a scramble, one requiring an exposed move and one perched above overhanging cliffs) make it far finer than its surrounding Munros. It is one of the classic mountains of Scotland.

Obviously the Glenfinnan Viaduct (hello Harry Potter) and the rest of the section that continues to Mallaig is also incredibly scenic, but I haven’t made it that far this time, partly because there aren’t many Munros that far along and partly because the train takes over five hours to get there from Edinburgh…

The photograph above, which has come out surprisingly well on my geriatric 3-year-old iPhone, was taken on Wednesday and is looking south over to Loch Trieg, from the summit of Beinn Teallach, a mountain which has the dubious distinction of being the lowest of all the Munros.

The Orbit continues to rise, it is now nine “tiers” high. The horizontal links will eventually I think be hidden behind a wrap, at least for the lower levels. It is interesting that there is still no scaffolding around the sculpture itself, with everything so far lifted in by crane and then bolted on by workers who are using the structure itself as the scaffolding. This presumably will not be possible to do once it gets much higher and starts to loop down and around:

It was also nice to see the salmon-pink Formans factory, itself a salmon processing plant, bathed in a salmon-pink sunset:

You can see all of the pictures in a Flickr gallery, including the previous Orbit ones.

The final route for the cycling road race, at next year’s London Olympics, has been published today. Unfortunately it’s only available as a PDF, so I’ve plotted it on BikeRouteToaster, you can see it here.

Here’s a download as a GPX file or as a KML file (for Google Earth.)

I like the inclusion of both Richmond Park and Bushy Park in the outward route. I normally try to include both when doing a day-cycle out to the west, recently they featured in routes to Windsor and to Oxford. Box Hill’s Zig Zag Road is a classic hair-pin climb. The cyclists will go down Coombe Hill – I know this hill well. It’s a pretty evil hill to go up and I would imagine it’s a lot of fun going down. Indeed it was the biggest hill I went up on the last day of my Land’s End to London cycle last year, and the hill that nearly broke my cycling partner, Paul, during training for that trip. However we both managed Box Hill just fine an hour later.

My route only goes around the Box Hill loop twice, whereas the Women’s Race goes around three times and the men cycle around it nine times! This is why my route is only 142km with 900m of climb, while they have considerably further and a lot more climb! However I think 142km is manageable for me as a nice bike ride this summer.

Here’s the profile:

The photo at the top shows part of the KML file of the route in Google Earth. The middle pic is using OpenStreetMap as a background map.

There’s also an “The Official Countdown to the London 2012 Games” which is launching at the same time. Could be interesting.

The London 2012 “brand” (i.e. jagged lines) is starting to grow on me, it has to be said. No circles in sight!

Of note, the map in the player pack is a rather nice (I think) restyled silver-and-black version of the green-and-black fold-out maps used in the original game. The source data is OpenStreetMap and the cartography reminds me somewhat of 8-Bit City – it’s not particularly useful for precision navigation, but is a nice example of Boing-Boing cartography, to borrow an expression from a talk at the recent Society of Cartographers conference. Oh, and they have credited OpenStreetMap contributors this time – yay!

The courses were TCX files, generated at BikeRouteToaster using the routing supplied by Google Maps and Cloudmade (OpenStreetMap data) – I alternated between the two depending on which showed the best looking cycle routes or most complete coverage of country lanes. Google’s road coverage is more complete but it’s API can (currently) only route journeys based on rules optimised for cars. OpenStreetMap still has big gaps in coverage in parts but is pretty good and showing dedicated cycle paths, in particular the flat (a luxury in Devon/Cornwall!) “rail trails”.

The first day’s route, as viewed in BikeRouteToaster

The TCX files are XML and are made up of two parts – the route itself, which is represented on the Forerunner unit itself as a meandering line, and turn indicators, which are derived from the data and in most cases are right – a spurious “straight on” indicator often appears when the country lane changes name, but most junctions are detected, apart from where the main road typically turns and the minor road carries straight on. This does result normally in a couple of unplanned detours, particularly for very shallow junctions where both the road and the junction turn in similar directions, where the route line does not help, but in general it means you can do a complete cycle without having to get a map (or smartphone) out at every junction.

One problem is restricted memory in the Forerunner 305, and that the use of this limited space doesn’t necessarily correspond the size of the data in the TCX files. For example, the turn directions took up around 10% of the space of the route lines in my TCX file, but appeared to take up double the space of the route lines on the device. By removing turn directions from the TCX files, reducing their files sizes by only 10%, I was able to store more than double the number of route lines.

The first day’s route in Garmin Training Center, before and after the turn directions were removed.

Older versions of the Garmin Training Center (sic) application, used to upload the TCX files, would fail silently, without loading all the files, when the memory limit was reached, and the current web-based uploader tool also gives an unobvious error message when the device runs out of space on uploading. However, the latest version of Garmin Training Center includes a pre-processing tool that examines the TCX files and only lets you upload files which collectively don’t exceed the limit – using checkboxes a useful “full bar” indicators. With this, I was able to see what files I could include, and that by removing the (relatively small sized) turn indicators, I was able to load in almost all 10 days worth of files.

The Garmin Training Center upload screen, before and after the removal of the turn-based directions, showing the difference it makes to the capacity used on the device (A striking difference, given that the turn-based directions only take up ~10% of the original TCX XML file.)

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