Cambridge Semi Orbital 35 average moving speed: 28.93km/h – another new best for this route, though again probably helped by the removal of the stop-start bit in town on the way out.
I hit a pothole that was hidden from view by a bus until it was too late. I think I was doing about 20mph, but may have started to slow at that point for the approaching roundabout. The hole was about a foot in diameter and three or four inches deep. My bike made a pretty nasty sound but I kept my balance. On pulling over to check the bike I realised the bars had rotated in the pop top holding them in the stem. I checked for other damage but I couldn’t see anything else. I suspect the bar slipping absorbed a huge amount of my downward momentum that would otherwise have done wheel or fork damage.
Not having an Allen key with me I came back with the bars in their now considerably rotated position (such that the drop straights actually point upwards at the back). Surprisingly it was quite comfortable; I think I might keep them like this for my next full ride and see how they are over distance.
Cambridge Semi Orbital 36 average moving speed: 27.86km/h – experienced the worst cross winds yet on this route. My Tracks now fails to upload the track to Google Maps (but Docs statistics work fine), and from what I can tell this is because the Google Maps Data API has suddenly been deprecated. Apparently the My Tracks team are working on an alternate upload mechanism. Not that it matters for SO36 as it’s the same route as the previous few rides anyway. More alarmingly, on this ride I noticed a creaking sound coming from the front forks and couldn’t remember whether I’d heard it before hitting the pothole on Monday. Fearing the worst I thought the forks might be damaged, but having done a fair amount of reading and subsequently inspecting both the fork and wheel I’ve found nothing to suggest they are damaged. The really quite conclusive evidence is that I was able to reproduce the creaking sound by scraping the front mudguard against the inside of the fork crown. So, false alarm, but I was pretty worried for a short while before inspecting it properly.
Route:
View Cambridge Semi Orbital 35 in a larger map
The final ride for this post is my 3rd CUCC training ride. Bullet points rule for this:
- Gale force winds of maximum speed 50 knots and mean speed 26.3 knots.
- Unpredictable and very gusty winds made for hazardous and not particularly enjoyable conditions – winds which are often present on the Semi Orbital route are comparatively steady and predictable and are worth having as they make up for the lack of hills – but the ones today were in no way pleasant.
- The winds were strong enough that:
- At one point they made me pull a wheelie.
- I sometimes pulled over, stopped and got off to wait while lorries passed.
- Sometimes 35 mph could be done with casual effort, and other times 10 mph was a flat out job.
- There had been meant to be two groups – fast and not so fast.
- While cycling at the back of group and before we’d split off a not so fast group, unable to easily see potholes in advance, I hit one and got a pinch flat.
- Shortly after hitting the hole and replacing the punctured tube I lost the still monolithic group and due to the winds struggled to catch up.
- I at first decided to carry on in the same direction and try to repeat the CUCC T1 route.
- Partly due to struggling to recall the route and more because I really didn’t like the winds but didn’t want to just head straight back (having only done about 15 miles at this point), I decided to head back up to the Shelfords and follow the last quarter of the “Full Orbital” route I did a few times last year which I thought might be better because a) I know the route and wouldn’t be stopping and starting all the time to check the map, which isn’t particularly fun b) I knew the roads would be reasonably quiet, and suspected that they would be less affected by the winds than others – plus there are a couple of almost-qualifying-hills which would be preferable to the wind.
Wind speed and direction graphs (source: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/weather/daily-text.cgi?2011-02-05):
What I suspect was the pothole I hit (I didn’t take the picture at the time but when returning along the same road in the opposite direction):
Pleasingly I managed to turn what started out OK and then started going bad into something good. Total distance 65.50km (40.69 miles), average moving speed 25.57km/h (15.89 mph). The pothole was somewhere on the road going south from Little Shelford to Whittlesford.
My Tracks still fails to upload route maps to Google Maps due to the the Google Maps API being deprecated. Hopefully My Tracks will start using Fusion Tables soon and convenient uploads to Google Maps will be possible again, but for now here’s an image of the route produced from the Route Trace I was also creating:
Update (26/02/11):
My Tracks once again has upload to MyMaps functionality. As I’m currently logging all rides I do with Route Tracer so I can add them to the dataset for my dissertation, I hadn’t bothered to backup the My Tracks routes when changing the configuration of my HTC Hero (whether that be removing the Market version of My Tracks to test out the new feature I developed or installing a new build of the CyanogenMod 7.0 Nightly Builds). For completeness now that MyMaps functionality has returned, I today generated GPX files from the Route Traces and imported using the My Tracks import functionality that I developed (which got added to the Market version along with the return of MyMaps functionality).
SO36 according to the imported Route Tracer data was done at an average moving speed of 26.30km/h whereas the original My Tracks record reported 27.86km/h.
Likewise for CUCC T3: Route Tracer data – 23.83km/h, My Tracks record – 25.57km/h.
The reason for this is that Route Tracer dumps data directly from the sensors without any preprocessing whereas My Tracks filters anomalies. It seems that this has resulted in an underestimate of the stationary times. My Tracks assumes GPX data is accurate/has been filtered and so the anomalies get through (which is also why those routes have very high maximum speeds).
Here is the Google Doc with all the stats:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?
key=0At0EKwdiLZmYdFg4Mk9fdHltdWlGeWpQTHMzM3RjU3c&hl=en_GB
