My profile

I'm 52 and have been cycling fairly long distances for a couple of years.  This started in 2006 with the idea of cycling from London to Montrose in Scotland, a place which I go on holiday each year.  I wondered if it would be possible to cycle up rather than take the train as usual, so I looked for ideas for a route and found the Audax UK's website with the London-Edinburgh-London information.  I used their route as the basis, with a couple of tweaks and an addition past Edinburgh up to Montrose.

That first ride was on my only bike at the time, a heavy old Saracen steel-framed mountain bike which I had found in a skip in Chelsea some years before.  The trip took 5 days, averaging just over 100m per day and stopping at youth hostels along the way.  Conditions were good and the whole episode was thoroughly enjoyable - I was hooked!

The following year I repeated the exercise, this time cutting a day off the schedule bringing the daily average up to around 135m per day for the 4 days.  This I achieved, but at some cost because the conditions were abysmal with rain and strong headwinds for the majority of the time.  By that time I had replaced the Saracen with a Dawes Audax road bike, but even so the whole trip was a real slog and left me exhausted and somewhat dispirited about distance cycling.

However, as the months passed, the bad memories faded and I began planning what seemed the next logical step, a Land's End to John o'Groats for 2008.  My research turned up a great site by 2 guys who had completed the trip in 7 days - www.lejog06.co.uk  This became my target.  Again I adjusted their route slightly on the advice of others, mainly on the CTC forum who had extensive local knowledge of the areas I was planning to travel through.

As I studied my proposed schedule I realised that the mileages were weighted towards the first three days, the last four being somewhat easier at just over 100m per day, and so I decided to see if I could cover the second half in 3 days rather than 4, bringing the total to 6 days.  My thinking was that, if I was going to undertake this trip at all, I'd likely only do it the once, so why not try and do it in the shortest time possible (for me!).

So the 6-day trip took root and I started to plan the stop-overs and book the accommodation, all the time keeping an eye on the long-term weather forecast!