I'm taking part in a John o'Groats-Glasgow charity ride this summer (at the end of August).
We plan to use the Sustrans trails to keep the ride off road for the majority of the way, going North to South and finishing in the Liquid Ship on Great Western Road. That was until some smartarse mentioned possible South-Westerlies that would give us a headwind for most of the 384 mile trip. This smartarse also said this is why most people go from Land's End to JoG for this precise reason...
I've ridden the Forth and Clyde Canal into Glasgow and experienced the sometimes fierce Westerly headwind that grinds you to a halt, and was wondering if this was a meteorological anomaly or whether we would also get this coming N-S.
We will be riding some of the route as training to get a feel of the terrain, surface, winds etc, but in case on those days the air is quite still I'd like to hear your experiences...
I'd be interested in any advice in general as well from those who have done this, or at least this part of the route if you're nuts/privileged/fit enough to go further.
I'll post up details of the charity and a link to our sponsor site once it's all up and running.
Thanks, Lee
Prevailing wind around here, ayrshire and Glasgow, is a strong south westerly, I know as I have to ride directly into the bloody thing on my commute home. And yes thats one of the reasons lejog is favoured rather than jogle.
And I never, ever, ever have a tailwind home no matter what the weather charts show.
Same is said about the Hebrides e2e but I had 5 days of a North Easterly!
Prevailing winds are S-W.
Look on the bright side, it means the winds are warm. And wet. And result in our crap climate on the south west coast. 🙂
Interesting. I presume the wind changes direction throughout the year though, and isn't constantly from the SW?
Maybe he wasn't a smartarse after all... 🙂
I'll echo the above comments. We rode Glasgow to Inverness in about 9 hours and had a nice warm South Westerly the whole way - could've been an 18 hour epic in the other direction!
What time of year was that, teacake?
Shame, there's not much to welcome you at JoG after 4 days in the saddle 🙄
We did it in July I think. We wrote a little report about it on our website: teamteacake.com
The prevailing wind is going to be S-W throughout the year unfortunately. You'll get more nasty stormy stuff in Spring, Winter and Autumn. Summer should hopefully be more stable and if you're on the East coast then you might get a seabreeze from the east, either cancelling out or maybe even helping you from behind! Maybe.
Best of luck!
[i]I presume the wind changes direction throughout the year though, and isn't constantly from the SW[/i]
From my experience, and I've been riding the same way for 3 years, it's almost always sw wind. There was a west wind last week which meant for some reason I had a bit of a headwind both ways. You get maybe a couple of days in the year where its very still but most of the time its a 10mph+ headwind.