Glasnevin to the summit of Howth

Great day for a cycle today. Hot and sunny - well as hot and sunny as Dublin gets. The round trip was 36 km and took me 1 hour 35 minutes. Went on my road racing bike. The views were spectacular for the whole trip. Well calling Griffith Avenue Spectacular might be a bit of a stretch, but the trees look very nice at the moment. Once I hit the coast though it was beautiful all the way. Plenty of cyclists, runners and walkers out today too. Went to beach yesterday, but decided that on a sunny Saturday it would be too hectic for me. The bike ride turned out to be a much more tranquil affair.
Howth is always a lovely place to visit, but giving the village a wide berth on a day like today was probably wise.

Android GPS Game for cyclists

This seems like as reasonable a place as any to mention this. At this stage it is very much in development, but it should be of interest to any weekend warriors. For now it is only available as a source download, so you have to be a bit Androidey to give it a go now, but once it is house broken I will put it on the market and get it out here.
Nice cycle today by the way. Hottest day of the year so far. And at the end of September mind.

Sorta interval training

I did some distance on the bike last week, so I wanted to do some more intense shorter workouts. If for no other reason than that I was spending too much time on the bike and not enough working.
Today I took the road bike out for about 40 minutes. The basic idea was to get warmed up for about 5 minutes. This was not a crawl warm up, but I was not killing myself either.
Then I started doing sprints for about 30 seconds - looking at the speedo while going flat out on a small cycle lane that crosses traffic and has random pedestrians misunderstanding what is for is a risky proposition, so timings are not quite exact. Then I would let the speed wind down for about a minute or so and then ramp it back up. Initially I was getting up to 30km/h for 30 seconds, but after a few cycles I was up to 40km/h. The 40 was just a target and I didn't stay there. Too hard given my current fitness.
I felt great after this workout and really feel that the compressed timeframe worked out well. I will be doing a few more workouts like this over the coming week and one long one to push the endurance up.

Cool video

New cycling training group

A Book Review

To say that we're using Towpath Tours by John Dunne as a guide for these trips is to undersell it. It was actually the inspiration to get out and just do it.

I travelled the majority of the canal by narrowboat on a couple of occasions nearly twenty years ago, and while even then the canal was easily navigable by boat, it was obvious that the towpaths were not. Bramble choked and sporadically pocked with bogholes of indeterminate depth after decades of neglect, any cyclist would have had a hard time of it.

I was therefore delighted and intrigued when I stumbled across Towpath Tours and read that, for the most part, the whole canal could be traversed by bike. In addition to the Grand Canal, coverage is also provided for the Royal Canal, the River Barrow, the Boyne Navigation, The Shannon-Erne Waterway, the River Lagan, and the Newry Canal. That's a lot of cycling.

Mr Dunne's inclusion of local history, geography and legend saves this book from becoming a dry instruction manual, and it's a good read in its own right. The problem, if any, is that some of the instructions, and particularly the maps, could be more detailed. Careful and repeated reading of the text is required to ascertain the crossing points from bank-to-bank, and better maps (including an indication of the route to travel) would have remedied this problem. In any event, you wouldn't want to undertake the trip without additional maps, and the Discovery Series 1:50,000 maps from the Ordnance Survey of Ireland are readily available in outdoor shops and even in larger newsagents. For the Grand Canal you'll need sheets (heading in a westerly direction) 50, 49, 48. The last 10K of the canal skims inconveniently across the corner of sheet 47 before straggling onto to sheet 53, but it's not worth buying these two unless you're a real perfectionist.

As Waldorf mentioned, the book is sadly out of print, so if you can get a copy at a reasonable price, snap it up. As for what a reasonable price might be, just remember that you could get quite literally years of enjoyment out of it.

Racked with Shame

The Grand Canal. OK, it's not the tour. There are no HC climbs (fortunately). In fact it's nearly flat. Our daily progress will be in tens rather than hundreds of kilometres. No broom wagon will forcibly remove us from the course if we start to flag. If the notion struck you, you could drive from its eastern most end in Dublin, to the most westerly point, Shannon Harbour, where it meets the River Shannon, in a couple of hours.

However the notion to suddenly drive to Shannon Harbour is not likely to strike anyone. Unless you actually lived there, (and that's statistically very unlikely as it's a very small place) the only reason you might be interested in Shannon Harbour will be intimately bound up with the canal and that's a good thing - the best way to cross the Irish midlands is by bike or by boat which allow an appreciation of the subtle beauty and quietness of the place: you just lose so much of this stuck inside a car.

Bearing all of the above points in mind, I'm comfortable with the idea of a rear carrier. Really. The carrier has however elicited derogatory comments from Waldorf, my towpath companion.

The offending item is pictured above. The next step is to invest in panniers, which will allow me to get rid of the rucksack - it's damn hard to appreciate subtle beauty when your back is a soggy mess. Other items potentially offensive to speed freaks, but which add to utility and which are visible in the picture are my kickstand, suspension seatpost, mudguards, and the "dork disc" between the sprockets and spokes.