Friday, April 6, 2012

Bike Ride to Cockermouth via Whinlatter

My plan was to do a longish bike ride, 50ish miles, but the weather was pretty horrible and so I was more than happy with the 30 odd miles I did which included coming up the back way over Whinlatter Pass.

map of the whole route 
(need to add about 4 miles onto the start because I didn't turn the gps on to begin with)

the stats

The first thing I did today that I was impressed with was to adjust my gears so that they no longer slipped and jumped.  It made for a much nice bike ride than normal.  I didn't take my garmin watch and set Runkeeper up to monitor the ride.  Runkeeper is an iphone App that announces your stats every 5 minutes if that's what you set it to do.  I was very encouraged by the announcements I was hearing, averaging 19mph.  When it started telling me that my current speed was 59mph, I knew something wasn't quite right.  In fact, according to Runkeeper, this bike ride was 56 miles.  You can see from the Runkeeper map below that something went a little bit wrong after 20 miles or so, I definitely didn't ride my bike across Bassenthwaite lake.


I think it was fairly accurate until I passed Loweswater.  This is the point where it started to rain heavily so maybe that was something to do with it.  My plan had been to meet my wife and daughter at Whinlatter, offload my bike and have a play:


However, the weather was not conducive for such plans.  I carried on past the Whinlatter Visitors Centre and headed home on the A66.  I got a phone call just outside Cockermouth from my wife, "We're at the visitors centre."  I had said that I would phone her when I was near.  I didn't bother phoning because I thought that there was little point going to Whinlatter in the rain.  I said I would meet her at The Sheep and Wool Centre where I got changed, had a beer and a packet of crisps and then set off home.

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