Bargain of the year...

£3,000 is a fair bit of cash for a new bike riding outfit even on Ride It! wages. Who's going to be the first person to turn up to a Ride It! event and complete the ride wearing the new Rapha cycling suit?

Rapha Riding Suit

Gateshead

Dr Dean Doolittle, he talks to the animals...

Gateshead Mountain Bike Route

We've just finished marking the mountain bike route for tomorrow. The route heads out through Derwent Country Park along the River Derwent before a bit of a long road climb up to Chopwell Wood. The route takes in the Chopwell Wood red trail with some nice singletrack and a few north shore sections before heading over to Hamsterley.

If you're hungry when you reach Hamsterley, check out the sandwich shop on the corner, you can't beat the hot beef sandwich :-)

From Hamsterley the route heads on to part of the National Cycle Network back towards Rowland Gill and the biggest climb of the day (579 feet in total), it's all on the road and seems to go on forever, you know when you reach it.

It's then through Sunniside and Whickham to bring you back to the finish at the shop.

Gateshead Road Ride Preview

We've just finished marking the road route ready for Sunday. It takes in some nice quiet roads that seem to head straight for miles, the official climb rating is pretty hilly :-)

Tony's Random Route Facts - The medium route encloses an area of 40,551.76 acres and the fun route split is at the highest point on the route.

Pictures below -

It's a pretty tiring job...

We've arrived in Gateshead..

But where's Keith....

Caption Competition...

The first picture in our new "Where's Keith?" feature, post your caption ideas below...

Hatfield Saturday

A great sunny day today that saw over 250 riders tackling the off road ride.

Hatfield Weather

Looking good for this weekend :-)

North London/Hatfied Off Road Ride

I've just finished marking my half of the ride ready for tomorrow, Keith's still out there doing the other half after deciding to have a bit of a lie in this morning.

After the rain showers over the last few days you can expect to get a little bit wet and muddy if your joining the ride tomorrow. On the positive side it's mostly shallow puddles on fairly hard surfaced tracks so there's no real deep sticky mud which means it's all rideable.

The route twists and turns a bit, going round Essendon, heading through Little Berkhamstead and out past Brickendon, it's mainly on byways and bridleways but with a few road sections necessary to link up the off road bits.

GPX download of the route should be available shortly.

North London/Hatfield Road Ride

We've been out today finalising the route and putting up signs ready for Sunday's road ride from Hatfield.

As we're using the same event venue as last year some of the route will be familiar to you if you joined on that ride, however, we've made a few changes to keep things interesting.

From Hatfield the route heads for the gap between Welwyn Garden City and Hertford. Near Hertford the short route riders start to head back, but for everyone else the route continues through Watton-at-Stone and Walkern before starting to head for home once you get to Cromer. Long route riders will do an extra loop that starts and finishes in Cromer.

There's no real killer climbs, mainly rolling country roads that seem to encourage you to get out of the saddle and sprint for the tops before you lose your momentum (or maybe that's just me).

We had a few thunderstorms today but they never lasted more than 10 minutes and most of the roads seem pretty dry considering. Forecast for Sunday is looking good, sunny and 16 degrees at the moment according to the BBC.

GPX downloads are now available.

GPX conversions

Hi
It became clear at the last event that we're having some issues with the GPX files that we post up. I've spoken to Garmin and the guys at Memory Map who supply our mapping data and the problem seem to be this. I have a slightly older version of MM that hasn't been updated since the 605 and 705 came out. These units also use TCX files which I dont have the facility to download. Having a full demo version of the routes supplied direct from MM means that the ability to update my version via the web has been disabled!

I'm working on this at the moment, but in the meantime you can do the conversion yourselves using the following website

http://www.bikeroutetoaster.com/Course.aspx

This was used by one of our MK staff at the last event.

Looking forward to seeing you all this weekend in Hatfield.

Cheers
Dean

A few changes...

Just to let you know me, Tony and Keith won't be doing the course marking anymore, someone new is taking over, click on the link to see him in action...

Murata Boy

We'll also be renting him out on saturday and sunday for anyone who likes the idea of coming to one of our events but isn't too sure about the actual cycling bit.