Juneathon 2014 – Day 19 – 20 miles before lunchtime

I’m taking part in the Great Kent Bike Ride on Sunday. It’s a great ride through gorgeous countryside and on the two previous years I’ve taken part, I’ve cycled the 35 mile route. This year, however, as I’ve got more cycling miles under my padded shorts now, I’ve decided to be hardcore and do the 60 mile route.

I haven’t been out on my bike much lately though as I joined a local social riding group but the last time we went out, I was too slow for them and I had to turn around half way and go back which isn’t very social, if you ask me (I should probably point out I wasn’t asked to turn back – I just didn’t want to spend the next 30 miles feeling bad for holding people up). This made me a bit despondent and demotivated and I haven’t fancied going out on my own since but as I’ll be doing 60 miles in a few days, I thought I’d better get on my bike and get some mileage in.

A 20 mile route was downloaded from Strava and added to my Garmin Edge Touring. The Garmin Edge Touring  is a sat nav for bikes and I love it so much. I’d been wanting one for a while now but they’re not cheap – I think the one I’ve got is the cheapest available and that’s around £200 – but it’s totally worth it. You can let it choose a round route for you or you can create your own routes on your app/website of choice and export them to your Edge. Select your map and off you go with no worrying about getting lost, just enjoy the ride. Because it’s a sat nav for bikes, it’ll choose the quietest route and you can also tell it to avoid hills where possible (an option I have permanently ticked).

The only criticism I have of the Edge (apart from now reminding me of U2, dammit) is that unless you’ve plotted out the route yourself on roads, it’ll try and make you go down trails/paths if left to choose for you. You can ignore this and carry on going though and after bleeping at you for a while for going off course, it’ll recalculate the route and get you back on track.

I hadn’t meant this to turn into an advert for the Garmin Edge Touring but if you want to cycle further than say about 10 miles, you should get one of these – I’ve cycled to lots of different places since having one without wondering if I’ll be able to find my way home again. Love love love.