To overcome the monster…

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Hills – love them, or hate them, you cannot alter the reality that they exist. You can try and avoid them – move to the Somerset Levels, or the Cambridge Fens, or most of Lincolnshire, for that matter, but sooner or later you will have to cycle up some hills. Some refer to monster hills, but ... Read more

Facts and perceptions

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There’s a massive difference between fact and perception, but as a species, we mostly operate on perceptions. Add to the mix the fact that psychology teaches us that humans tend to first form an opinion, then look for reasons to support that opinion, and things can rapidly get messy. For many thousands of years, humans ... Read more

Preparing for a cycle tour

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How do you prepare for a cycle tour? How do you prepare yourself, so your cycle tour is pleasure, not punishment? No, this post will not turn into a detailed, structured training plan (though it does contain a link to a simplified training plan). If you were preparing to tackle the Hour record, I’d expect ... Read more

Back to basics – Let there be light

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I’m a huge fan of cycling in the dark, which is just as well, as almost half the year most cycle commuters cycle in the dark both ways. There’s something completely different about cycling in your personal bubble of light, along otherwise totally dark roads, and I rather strongly feel this is something everyone should ... Read more

Frazer’s Tour – Part 2

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This is Part 2 of Frazer Goodwin’s 3-part guest blog about his 1 400km ride from Belgium to Sweden. If you haven’t yet, I suggest you read Part 1 first. Part 2 I finally completed a bike ride in the summer I’ve been thinking about and planning for years – riding from my home in ... Read more

Frazer’s Tour – Part 1

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This guest post is by Frazer Goodwin – he’s on Twitter as @FrazerGoodwin and you really should follow him. Frazer is English, but lives in Belgium. Enough from me, I’ll hand over to Frazer now.

Part One

“Aren’t you too old to travel that far on a bike?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked by both friends and family. But I have finally managed to complete a multiday bike ride I’ve been planning for years – a ride from my home in Brussels to my in-laws place in Sweden on an island north of Gothenburg. When I posted that I’d done it on Facebook, a good friend here in Brussels simply responded “Nuts”.

Well, I didn’t get to ride that far at 57years of age by just climbing on the bike and setting off. So this short series about my bikepacking will start with the planning and preparations I undertook before the next post details the trip itself and then a final one will review what I’ve learned and plan to do next…

I have been thinking of riding to the island off the Swedish west coast where my in-laws have a house for a couple of decades. It is after all where my wife and I married more than 20 years ago. I had planned the ride in detail for last year, but the pandemic kyboshed it then. I managed to turn it into a tour of the Netherlands to at least use some of the accommodation I’d already booked. And that trip provided me with a lot of insight about how both my bike-setup and I coped on a multi-day bikepacking trip.

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Back to basics – winter cycling

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Every year a bunch of people start cycling in the spring or the summer, and are determined to carry on cycling through winter. Every winter there are loads of cyclists who give up cycling. Let’s have a look at what you can do to keep you riding through winter. Wet Let’s deal with the elephant in ... Read more

Looking forward

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We live in the Information Age, and most of us have instantly-available information at our fingertips, courtesy of the Internet. We also have more information available to us now than ever before, yet it seems we chose to primarily use the Internet to spread doom and gloom, with the occasional cute kitten video to lighten ... Read more

The foreigner’s guide to cycle-touring in the UK

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Time for a tongue-in-cheek look at foreigners cycle touring in the UK. Now the UK is exquisitely beautiful and it's no wonder it receives so many tourists. The main island itself is small, and is little over 800 miles from end to end, making it perfect for cycle touring. Indeed, one of the most iconic of British rides is the End To End. This ride either starts in the south (Land's End) and finishes in the north (John O'Groats) when it's abbreviated as LEJOG, or it starts in the north and finishes in the south, when it's referred to as JOGLE.

But I need to drive…

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Have a conversation with the vast majority of people, and you will very soon hear how everyone needs their car. You will be told detailed stories of how they use their cars to collect fridges, couches and more. So much so that I wouldn’t at all be surprised if someone claimed they used their car to ... Read more

A Redlake Ride

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I’ve posted about Redlake before – it’s out on Dartmoor, and there’s a disused china clay mine, which left behind three things of note: a large spoil heap, a pit that’s long-since filled with water, forming a pond, and the remains on what used to be an old railway track. The name predates the mine, ... Read more

Back to Basics – Cycle Helmets

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Cycle helmets are often a highly divisive topic, surrounded by a wealth of myths and misunderstandings. This post is NOT going to tell you whether or not you should wear a helmet. Instead, I will try to give you some clarity about cycle helmets. Back in 2014, I had a crash. I still distinctly recall ... Read more

Back to basics – Saddles

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A very common complaint about cycling is about pain or discomfort caused by the saddle. Let’s get the obvious point out in the open right away: we are all different, and our bodies are different. What this means in practice is that a saddle that’s extremely comfortable to you might be excruciating for me to ... Read more