Ride done.Time to Party like it's 1979 :D

Well it's been a while and for that i apologise.

We've had an exciting week or three.

11th September we met outside my flat, ready to go and full of butterflies. and fired up the Satnav in Lyndsey's car. with Kevin in tow.

Now something told me to bring Both Nokia phones with me, Call it a gut feeling if you will, but i trusted my gut more than my bike at that point. (and we'll cover that in the next post)

Remember this ride is epic for me as it's the first time I had a team with me on balls of steel and strange a feeling it was.

Also strange was meeting Lorna Bland, the chair of Surrey Sands and general great lady, who is passionate about the support group she leads and community she works with.

Eventually we set off, and boy google maps messed us about. (i'll sync with Ovi Maps next time)

Thanks to it's array of footpaths instead of roads we had a few location issues, which is shown by Endomondo, well until the battery ran out that is.

As you'll see from the map we were only a few miles from 40 when i dropped off the face of the earth, and could not log back in on phone two. Sadly The Nokia E71 actually failed me, for the first time ever. I was flabbergasted at this, my powerhouse died, but in fairness it was busy crunching A-GPS, Data and using bluetooth for the hands-free in my ear. from 6.20 AM until around midday. so it worked well, my steed! (i love my E71 and it gets treated well as a result, I've ordered a new housing for it)

Anyway heres the first part of the ride, Sorry no second map, it refused to let me log in when i swapped devices

The Second part of the ride was more difficult, as we had a breakdown in the first 30 miles, which rendered one of the riders out of the ride, it seems his freshly serviced bike pedal was not put back on properly damaging the pedal beyond repair, I doubt we could have pulled it back into life so with regret we left him there once weknew transport was arranged for him. Sorry Squire!

After the breakdown in the first half it hit a few of us and worry set in, well at least for me anyway. We kept going, and i started to hurt. Lipsyl to the rescue (just don't ask where i applied it) mainly my legs started to cramp up, and it affected my performance, and gosh it was not good.

a few of the others had problems too but i seemed to bear the brunt of it and i feel like i let the team down in that respect. Sorry.

We ploughed on, through little roads with tones of idiot drivers, destined for a darwin award one day, until we noticed a problem.

inconsistancies with the map had lead to us extending the mileage by 20 miles, so by the time we were near Aylesbury we had less than 10 miles to complete the 80 mile ride aggreed.

Now in 10 miles we had to work out what to do, which you'll see in the video below what we decided to do in the end, Complete the 80 miles in Aylesbury.

Now as this was an issue none of us were expecting we are gutted we never got back to Dunstable on the bikes.

But in the end of the day, we were all worn out at our new ending point of Aylesbury train station. and we even completed 86 miles, So can't be all bad.

Here is the video. highligting the short Vlogs i made while we stopped.

Now with this uploaderised onto the party.

17Th september your ALL invited to The white Swan inn, High street South, Dunstable

for our fundraising bash, lots of local buisinesses are involved in our giveaways and were even giving away a Sony Ericsson w995 with thanks to phones4u

come and join us

Even if it's just to see me go bald! (yes i'm having my head shaved!)

Paul

Good and bad news

The n97mini has gone back to WomWorld Nokia. it's a little saddening really.

it had a few flaws like all phones do, but they could be ignored. plain and simply becuase it

worked well. it could have been a worthy replacement to the E71 over the 5230.

Below are the naughty trio. all with Endomondo fired up and ready to go.

The naughty toys in standby.

i touched on this before but i felt guilty when using the n97 mini, even had butterflies when i turned on the phone, yes thats sad! I admit it.

but it worked well, the GPS issues improved with an update to Endomondo, Sports tracker was not the best, but showed me where i needed to improve, ( My issue is where i need to work on my breathing an fatigue. to try and reduce stoppages as a result)

I shall now use the E71 and the 5230 for both tasks.

I would be posting an endomondo post for the last 2 days, but sadly Endomondo is down, Sunday was a casual 7.5 mile ride around Kensworth and Dunstable with gus, the main intention was the hill climbing avaliable to me on these routes. to improve on my own fatigue issies.

Mondays was a longer ride on a solo route.

Route took me into Dagnall, and into studham, through kensworth and back home over the downs.

Tonight i plan to go on a similar route

but going straight through dagnall, into Ringshall, little gaddeston, studham, Whipsnade, Dunstable downs then homeward bound. (or i may go to ashridge then back to dagnall then studham from there.)

this route will be demanding as the route is situated on a lot of narrow roads with steep hills with nowhere to hide away. (well on to ashridge anyway) But all in good fun i suppose.

On a bad note.

MRI Scan tomorrow.

the only thing annoying me is i should probably ride it, but i think with training tonight i will be a little sleepyface to ride at 9am

Good side is were closer to finding out the cause of my problems and how to fix them :)

One small update is were also building a trailer for my bike so we can keep some sort of supplies on us during the ride, which if all goes to plan will mean we'll have tools, energy snacks and emergency parts if anything goes wrong. I'll even try and install breaks to help with the additional load it'll be carrying :)

time to get ready for tonight

Stay safe.

Paul :D

What a week!

I arrived back from holiday in Hunstanton yesterday and it's good to be home.

this is a quick post to be updated tonight.

Training resumes properly monday, with a more miles to be put in and more pain to be had :)

this will also be daily to keep up with the rest of the balls of steel riders.

which means i may be more grouchy, but rest assured the Vlogging will continue and the posting of training will continue.

Were also looking for some people to help "letterbomb" the shops in the Quadrant for goodies to give away for the raffle/auction.

anyone interested?

No training logs from holiday, no GPS signal thanks to lack of mobile signal so it rendered Endomondo useless.

Mustn't Grumble. :)

more tonight

Update on N97Mini and training.

YAYS. No GPS issues at all today, i also got a response from 3 confirming there was cell issues in the local area. and GPS seemed to stay 100% strong on my small training session yesterday.

I can only conclude that the N97 mini WomWorld Nokia gave me is amazing. and i dread the day the DHL man comes. Seriously i'll be as sad as the day my Nokia 5146 was stolen.

I felt guilty when i first put my sim card into it, it felt so so wrong to use it. it was like i was cheating on my E71 with a younger model. (strictly true really) but after 24 hours i was straight in there, the keyboard feels great under your fingers, and although not always the most felt keypresses, they were still responsive.

All in all jess has said she likes it so much she wants one on her next upgrade which is early next year, Which i'm happy about as it means she may forget about her want of "El DeathGrip iDevice" which makes me really happy.

Now then Back to training.

It was a light ride yesterday. not the longest, but i pushed harder at certain parts like the hills,

resulting in a good uphill and fast downhill. (with idiotic driver)

Mr BMW decided to stay behind me, Due to the pace i was moving.

Everything went good. bar one small issue. Misreporting of speed. one day 60mph the next 35mph. (the speedo showed 42.1mph and Sports tracker showed 39.8mph

The best bit of the ride was Bison hill. The video says it all. sadly not filmed with the n97 as i could not get it to mount safely. if it was my device it would have been tape and glued into place.

Oh well the Nikon Coolpix does the job well.

This does bring me to a rant though at 0:48 Seconds there used to be huge chevron signs on the bend. Now i struggled to keep the bike going round the corner at speed, how many car drivers think it's deceptive and have been involved in accidents there I wonder?

I think Central Bedfordshire Council could hit me up and explain why that's not deemed a risk but putting "bloody HUGE" speed humps on a road, because a village councillors concerns for his granddaughter plays by the road outside his house (*read disclaimer at bottom) (then again the same parish councillors who let a great pub die too)

I doubt they'll do anything sadly. ho hum

In all great week training wise. lots of positives and a few negatives but all great.

on that note i have to get ready for something. Good night. Sleep well.

*This is the views of vilagers in Kensworth. (at present not my views. IF i discover the case is as depicted I will be feeling angry as these humps are utter rubbish, i've already damaged my bearings once there. don't want that again.

N97Mini so far

Well it's been a few days now and my initial impressions of the device outweigh the little issues i have while using it.

The main issue i see is a small one, impacted on by a few factors. Cell Tower Strength being the main one and "forgetful" GPS. I can forgive this, as it does seem to realise it's errors and resume as normal, but did seem to cause loss of miles at times. even if it caused confusion with my preivous workout. which i blame on it looking for the easiest path to re-loacate from A to B (even if through a farm and houses)

Apart from that i love the phone. It's responsive to my command, and the touch screen kicks the behind of the 5230XM, again fat fingers may be to blame there though, but really like it lots. the only thing i would change bar the GPS is to create a non touch version, akin to the E75 then it would be amazing to have the choice of a touch version of non touch version.

It will be a sad day to send it back. but all will be good. the 5230 and dying E71 will keep going.

In using the Device I've decided not to use paid for apps, To be ohnest I can do everything i need for free, and will do so through apps on the Ovi Store.

Since picking it up the free apps i'm using are:

Endomondo, As its my Tracker of choice. supported over many mobile OS's which makes it awesome.

Sports Tracker, I'm new to this, and liking what i've seen already.

Snaptu, Excellent J2me (Java) based application which brings many apps in a tiny applet.

Emoze Email services for a multitude of services. (i would of used Email on 3 but it kept throwing the dreaded "not compatible message" from 3uk)

i hope to put the pics I'll take up in a video soon. I've not used the cam much bar for video and training so we'll see how the Carl Ziess optics hold up in Sunny Dunstable tomorrow. :D

More tomorrow

No training tonight Repair on the bike caused too many issues i am looking into now. hope this don't force ordering of parts sooner than later.

Great news! We have a van! YAYS

I would like to say an extra special thank you to the co-organiser Vicky for securing a van from the amazing Local company Drivestyle Vans These guys are absolutely amazing.

Now then I'm firing some video clips into Sony Vegas now to mash together of me replacing bits of the chain. the quality will change twice but i found the higher settings. :)

Back soon

Tonight's Training: Varied success.

Evening.

as promised. I'm back. i never got to film on Dunstable Downs, too many chavs and donut here forgot the mmc for bikecam.

also the chain went again twice. on my last 3 spare pieces so new part order will go in soon.

but the ride went well. slower than expected but at the same time better than expected as i tried a different route.

the only problem was GPS reliability. i seemed to hit a few black spots the E71 would have got round. but i think that was me using 2 GPS dependant apps in a row. we'll eliminate that bug tomorrow.

All in all a good night. now to rest and order parts for the bike. Well, get quotes then monster fixing time.

stay safe. Peace!