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Same as @Greenbank, choosing an alternative route is totally okay. Grand chapeau!
On PBP the route is mandatory? How can they enforce that?
cgg
My LEL:
I told them about doing LeJogLe in 8 days, and they put me in the 5am group. I read the terms and conditions, saw that we were free to take any route we like between controls, and thought, "ooh, it's like TCR, find the fastest route" thinking that everyone else who was after a fast time would do the same. This misunderstanding of the spirit of the ride was my biggest rookie LEL mistake I think. It's certainly my biggest regret now, as I'll never now how long it would have taken me on the official route.
As Lesley was volunteering at the start and sleeping there over Saturday night, I got to ride to registration on Saturday as my final equipment shakedown and then sleep in our campervan at the start, to be right there on the spot for 5am.
And, we're off. I set off with 2 pints of whole milk, 500g of marzipan, a chorizo and a few other odds and ends in the shopping basket on the front of my bike. After about 6km my route diverged from the official one, which was a bit of a relief as it was quite high traffic and some road racer types were coming much closer than I was comfortable with. I went up via Bishop's Stortford and Cambridge and took the busway into St Ives. There were no buses on Sunday, it was very quiet.
I went through the first couple of controls a few minutes before they officially opened, but others were ahead of me and nobody seemed to care too much. On I went. When I got to Thirsk though, I was gleefully told that I was one of the first riders in (hardly surprising after taking a fast route though York instead of grimping up and down the Howardian Hills) and I felt like I was cheating. It was now clear that some fast riders were holding an unofficial mandatory route race within LEL over the official route, and were assuming that I was in it. I was, in effect, cheating in a race that I never intended to enter. Chatted to Darren Franks and @Jasmijn a bit here.
North of Thirsk my routes were pretty similar to the official route anyway, so I decided not to worry too much about that for now and carried on as planned, plodding on to Barnard Castle where Lesley was now working, and slept in our camper van.
Day two: over Yad Moss in the morning, I left before first light having decided that climbing in the dark would be fine and I'd prefer to descend the other side in daylight. This worked well. It would have worked slightly better had I not loaded the wrong route on my Garmin and spent the whole leg thinking it wasn't working properly until I eventually got to the start of the route at Brampton, but I made it.
I rolled on. At Edinburgh I was straight in and out of the control, preferring to stock up on food in the 24 hour Asda in Straiton and eat on the move. At that point I was quite focused on getting along quickly, hoping to make it back over Yad Moss to the campervan at Barnard Castle before it got too late. My route from Edinburgh to Innerleithen was the most off-piste of the northern segments (via Peebles, another chance to stock up at Sainsburys) and was quicker on paper but added more east-west travel which may have actually slowed me down vs the official route with the winds at the time, but of course I'll never know for sure. Regret regret regret.
By the time I got to Brampton it was clear that I'd be descending the in the dark while very tired if I pushed on to Barnard Castle that day, and I had a drop bag at Brampton, so I stopped there to sleep. I can still remember that I was in bed x24 and that their whiteboard and tupperware box bed booking system was working smoothly. Also, they actually dropped the drop bags: guy shouts your number out, other guy lobs your drop bag over the balcony, first guy catches it.
I asked for 3 hours, woke naturally a bit before and pressed on. I remember chatting to somebody on the way up Yad Moss who'd got back to Brampton after me and failed to get a bed or enough sugar, and giving him a couple of mini mars bars from the magic shopping basket. That was the point, I think, that I resolved to stay on the official route from here to the end. I didn't actually have to make a final decision until Thirsk, because my routes between Brampton and Thirsk were identical to the official route anyway, but in hindsight I think that moment rolling up Yad Moss was where it crystallised.
Back at Thirsk, Tesco stop and route set swap. I had a whole load of alternative route and map sets in different versions of the Garmin directory on my sd cards, and I used the file manager on my phone to rename the one I wanted to /Garmin before moving the sd card into the edge 1000. This worked flawlessly, the only downside being the length of time it took the garmin to turn on as it parsed all the routes for the first time.
Off I go over the Howardian Hills and on, stopping for a meal at each control but managing to keep the stopped time down fairly well I think. Hill, hills, knees and ankles hurt, voltaren gel, hills, fens at night (not too much wind), Spalding: sleep.
5am and I'm rolling again, more fens, quite windy but nothing like what would hit the riders behind me later. Knees getting painful but ankles mostly ok, don't want to use any more painkillers, press on.
Great Easton stands out as a control I enjoyed my time at (not that they weren't all awesome), chatted to Phil Whitehurst here, and obtained seconds of rice pudding by asking nicely. Knees very painful. Consider switching to my flatter originally planned route for the final leg, give myself a mental slap and continue on the official route slowly and wincing a lot. Wish I had a triple. Walk up a hill. Gradually either my knees improve or I become inured to the pain, and things settle a bit.
Finish, picture taken. Within half an hour I'm rolling again on the ride home (because I Want My Own Shower And My Own Bed) with the knees twinging a bit but broadly surprisingly ok. The number of hours in which I actually finished is a bit meaningless having made the mistake of taking some easier routes, so I won't mention it here.
Aftermath: I feel like death for a day or two, particularly when trying to walk down stairs. Back to riding to work on Monday, on the road bike and making extensive use of the small chainring and even then wincing with knee pain especially at the start of each ride. Thursday's ride home was a milestone: all the way on the big chainring and no wince-out-loud knee pain :)
Index of equipment failures:
During the first day going over a bump, my heavily loaded front shopping basket bounced down onto the front mudguard, causing the wheel to catch it and rip it forward. Spent the rest of the ride with a mudguard cabletied to the front of the shopping basket and wet feet.
Also during the first day, the metal bracket holding my dynamo front light fatigued and snapped, so I stopped and effected a pvc tape and cable tie repair. The light wouldn't stay at the right angle though, so it was turned off for the rest of the ride.
Northbound while eating at Brampton (I think) my plastic fork exploded.
On the northbound descent of Yad Moss one of my bottle holders came loose in the wet; it had been mounted lower than the frame allows using one screw and (non-waterproof it turns out) double sided tape to make room for a framebag that I wasn't using at the time. Remounted it with both screws.