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I wouldn't worry about not riding the official route the entire time. Unlike PBP the LEL route is not mandatory. Plenty of faster riders take some of the faster alternatives.

Thanks, I still feel like I have unfinished business for a future LEL though :)

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.

How was LEL?

Sufficiently hard, and humbling. TCR might have been too much :)

is @Nick.Earthloop doing this?

Nope, LEL for me this year.

Can you run 28mm tyres lower than 75 psi

I run mine at 60 and I'm not dead yet - I'm 80kg

In :)

Another year, another plan to do the dynamo fixed. Maybe this is the year that I won't have been broken by something else and reduced to riding the road bike at dynamo time.

I have a pair of these, they're surprisingly light.

https://www.ukfinefoods.co.uk/Products/IX-6G0B-26HE/meat-lifting-forks-and-shredding-claws?gclid=CjwKEAiAr4vBBRCG36e415-_l1wSJAAatjJZq09ETQN63F1HIIMwdY04l39o5wmc2amxb-O3mF3xPRoClyXw_wcB

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mkpaa/sets/72157655872912539/

ministerial department responsible solely for walking and cycling

So that the daily mail can liken it to the ministry of silly walks.

I'm imagining code that looks like this going in to satisfy political pressure:

if in_the_shit:
   if have_reliable_information:
      trolley_problem()
   else:
      slam_on_brakes()

... and elsewhere:

if in_the_shit:
   # being in the shit is correlated with sensor failure
   sensor_error_likelihood += 0.1

...


if sensor_error_likelihood > 0.05:
   have_reliable_information = False

... so trolly_problem() is unreachable and can be coded in whatever way is most politically expedient.

The correct action depends on the car's assessment of the quality of the information it has as well. The trolley problem type perfect information scenarios aren't really that realistic IMO.

There's suddenly a car/skip/wall/moose/child in the middle of the road where there wasn't one before, what should I do ? Was I wrong a second ago when I thought there was no moose nearby , or am I wrong to think that there is a moose now ? Is someone messing with me somehow ? The correct action has to be to conclude that my shit is all fucked up, stop trusting what I think I know and apply the brakes while holding my current line and hope for the best.

Also, if I think I'm in a very rare edge case, then statistically the odds are that I'm wrong.

Car occupants have to choose to turn on self driving mode, or at least choose to buy a self driving car. If allowing the cars to prioritise the safety of occupants reduces the amount of manual driving that goes on, then it may actually make everyone else safer than if "prioritise the safety of others" was compulsory.

For now, I think, self driving car uptake is the most important thing. Maybe much later there should be something like "if you have your car in selfish mode then your legal liability in a crash is greater, therefore so are your insurance premiums".

I just did an 8 day LeJogLe sleeping in a camper van, as prep for TCR next year (if I get a place) with no standing climbs in order to prevent my knees from exploding. The knee thing worked (yay) but now my arse is in tatters.

Aside from that my biggest niggle was swelling at the ankles just above the tops of the shoes, leading to painful rubbing between the tongue of the shoe and the front the of the ankle when my socks were wet, which wore away the skin. Has anyone else had this happen on ultras ? Should I wear compression socks, tape the front of the ankle and/or cut down the tongue of the shoe ?

It's a bit ridiculous as there are lot of extra car parking spaces but what can you do, the landlord decided to charge and our company has to suck it up.

Park a bike-parking shed in a parking spot ?

full of water > let down

We have inadequate bike parking here, and a bunch of us have started bring our bikes into the office in an act of peaceful civil disobedience. Office manager has given up trying to stop us.

yup

They even swept the road for us

I came 8th in category. Everything hurts, especially my knees and lower back.

My first 24 hour :)

I'll be there, number 4 on the grid

The annoying thing is that I do actually enjoy staring at maps for hours on end, and thought I'd route-checked really thoroughly, but I still didn't spot half a dozen off-road sections that crept in.

Someone should write an openstreetmap thing to which you can upload a route and have it warn you about bits that are surface=unpaved or bicycle=no or roadisinshite=yes

Wow, imagine how far he would he have got if he wasn't dragging some guy who wouldn't let go of the back wheel.

honour