A loop around Cross Fell and Great Dun Fell.

Big climb up to Cross Fell

Down from Greg’s Hut

Source of the South Tyne

Pretty much all singletrack from there to Great Dun Fell, the occasional washed out section

Then it was down the Great Dun Fell access road

It would be better in the opposite direction and with a different BW descent off Cross Fell. More shots and text at https://bearbonesbikepacking.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=20380

👏 👏 👏

Customs are only likely to take note of you if you head to France with bikes on the back, come back with no bikes, head back with bikes loaded, etc. See how Richard Branson started Virgin.

TJ = twerpJerk

I had to check twice as to who posted that!

Yes!

When I was living in N. Wales and climbing was my main sport I went to check out an undeveloped crag. On the way up to it a pair of buzzards began attacking me, obviously nesting nearby, they never made contact but it was pretty hairy. Their idea of “territory” might be a bit different from ours plus individual birds/pairs have different tolerances.

Some years ago a pair of Eagle Owls would nest somewhere near Dunsop Bridge and they were very territorial and at least one footpath had to be closed for the duration.

Generally they take a swipe at the highest point, i.e. your scalp so having something higher than that is a good idea. I doubt they’d puncture a cycling helmet for example. The behaviour is “aggressive” and aimed at deterrence rather than causing injury per se. Most birds, even big raptors, are pretty fragile and can’t risk being entangled with a large adversary and then being injured and unable to hunt.

Au contraire mes amis.

Remember the Ft William World Cup DH about five or six years ago that was cancelled/delayed because of a storm going through? Well we were on the WHW during that and at the time we just had an Alpkit Rig3.5 which is 2.4m x 1.4m so a little smaller than the tarp I use now and we stayed perfectly dry under that.

You gain room, both floor area and height, by lifting the tarp (this also gives better airflow so less chance of condensation). You get better protection by lowering it. So it’s a balancing act but you don’t have to have both sides of the tarp lifted by the same amount, if the wind’s coming from one direction then set that side lower but lift the other side to compensate.

Technique over size – as I’m always telling my wife!

Colin – try an asymmetric Holden setup. You get better headroom (well the headroom is better suited to where you sit up) plus a slightly larger portal for ingress/egress.

So frustrating when you do route searches and find a whole stack of short, locked threads which refer to each other in a rambling way. You then have to open a new bloody thread to ask one tiny snippet that you need that is missing. Which means there are now stack +1 threads all vaguely linked together for the next person to try to reconcile.

TrainerRoad have their own forums, I think they use Discourse as the software, anyway it has a couple of really useful features regarding the above.

1. When you start a thread and give it a title the S/W suggests other threads that might be similar.

2. If you persist and the thread is a duplicate then there’s a function that lets the moderator merge the two threads and close the duplicate.

Anyway Mark has, in the past, stated that they chose the current S/W as it integrated with other parts of the business.

Not really, it weighs 140g with all the guylines and packs down to the size of a water bottle. Gives me full coverage, in fact it’s possible to get two under it and stay dry.

Aye, if you use massive tarp, that’s fine, I only ever bivvyd with a wee head tarp.

My “massive tarp” is a gargantuan 2.5m x 1.5m!

A bit late to the party …

I’ve used both and both have their advantages and disadvantages. I prefer tarp+bivy as it just feels different to camping. I’ve woken up when under a tarp to look at deer grazing just a couple of metres away, in a tent they’d be long gone while you open zips, etc. There’s just a connectivity to the outside.

There’s no need for a full waterproof bivy bag when using a tarp, I’ve a Borah Gear bivy bag and it’s mainly to deal with spray, condensation on the underside of the tarp and insects than actual rainfall – that’s the tarp’s job.

Tents: light, cheap, usable – pick any two. The really light tents are little more than hooped bivvies in many cases. Something that you can sit up in and not feel like you need to master personal origami will cost – I think ours was the best part of £500. Split between us it’s 750g each, the tarp and bivy (with pole & pegs) is about 380g.

Does depend on what your main use will be: for campsites with occasional wild camping go with a tent; wild camping or ultralight go with tarp and bivy. No one right answer.

OK, here’s my thoughts on the Trainerroad Polarised Plans. They just happened to come along before I finished my last Plan Builder assigned progression. I was starting to get a little jaded with that if truth be told, after all I’d been doing some variation of Low Volume Sweet Spot Base and various Build plans since October 2019 (all hail the Covid lockdowns!) so something new would be of help.

I went with the Mid Volume plans, six week then eight week. The reason for “stepping up” from LV wasn’t so much that I was fitter (I was) but that my LV plans invariably included longer weekend rides so I was really swapping LV + unstructured/un-associated rides with an endurance ride associated with a workout.

I set all workouts to be outdoors. I began the plans in the first week of April just as the weather here in the UK was becoming drier if not warmer – we’ve had one of the coldest springs in recent years. This raised its own problems in that I live in a hilly area, even the “flat” roads are anything but, “rolling” would be a better description. Not a problem with the endurance workouts but a bit of Strava detective work, i.e. looking at my times on various potential hills and I reckoned I could map workouts onto some of those. It’s surprising just how far you can go, even uphill, in sixteen minutes! Also the hills aren’t a steady grade, the one I chose for threshold intervals had 150m @ 20%, 200m @ 10%, 100m @25%, 800m @ 5%, etc. Pacing is a nightmare!

I haven’t done an FTP test in a while – I don’t seem to get on with the Ramp Test – but I have a good idea of how various workouts should feel and, yes, let’s be honest, I’d probably stagnated. The eFTP from intervals.icu was 5W lower than that obtained via one of the few good Ramp Tests I’ve done: 267W vs 272W. (When I started on TR back in Oct 2019, my FTP was 244W) Because of this I’ll use eFTP as a proxy since there were updates during the plans and it’s the one figure I have to compare over the period plus it’s always been within 5W of the TR figure.

One last point: I signed up for their latest feature – Adaptive Training, basically machine learning, shortly after the announcement but only got added to the Closed Beta when I was one week into the eight week build plan. Since I’d added the plans manually rather than doing the use Plan Builder then swap out the plans method I decided to keep on with the Polarised Plan and ignore AT for the duration. I knew I wouldn’t get any adaptations but I wasn’t looking at going along that road at this time.

I found the endurance workouts very easy, in fact the hardest part was keeping the power down, this was in part due to the aforementioned rolling roads – keeping to 70% of FTP is rather tricky when you are faced with a 16% grade! Most of the time I just went for a ride and didn’t bother about the duration so a 2hr workout often ended up as a four hour ride. I often did these on my mountain bike which doesn’t have a power meter so I went by HR instead – I’ve a good idea of what pace/HR to do for 70% and Strava’s estimated power isn’t far off.

The threshold and VO2max workouts meant hill work. The first threshold workout called for eight minute efforts – easy enough. My PB on the segment I used for the 16min threshold was 13;30 so slightly short of the duration required but pacing and using the next bit of road meant I was never much more than a minute short. The plan called for two repeats, then three the next week and four the week after that. After the last of these Intervals.icu bumped my eFTP to 272W, i.e. the same as from the Ramp Test. Here’s my notes from that workout:

“Pretty consistent with times and power on each lap/climb. A slight decline over the first three then a bigger drop to the fourth one. I think a fifth would have been really hard work so just right for where I’m at. The power levels were actually: 105%, 106%, 105%, 103%, so pushing into the bottom of VO2max territory – this is born out in intervals.icu which shows 24mins in that zone, so probably the intervals were really a set of over-unders. Looking at the power trace, they do look very over-under in nature, albeit with the overs at 117% and the unders at 90%, obviously dictated by the gradients and ramps of the climb.”

VO2max is one of my weak points on the trainer – I possibly move the bike a lot and the fixed nature of the trainer means I can’t do that. Outside I’m a bit freer. My chosen hill for these varied between flat and maybe 5% but long enough that I could choose “flat then climb” or “climb then flat”. Again these worked well and I hit or exceeded the power targets repeatedly and consistently though 12 efforts over the same bit of road do tire somewhat!

I didn’t see any further improvements during the Base phase and the start of the Build phase was delayed slightly by a four day bikepacking trip in the south of England.

Build.

There’s a few common workouts in Base and Build and one of these, saw my next increase in eFTP to 276W. The week after this saw a significant rise in eFTP to 291W. Here’s my ride notes:

“Got an email from intervals.icu that my eFTP had risen to 291W because of this ride! It could well be right, my average power for the four climbs was 316W, 294W, 294W & 302W. The middle two definitely felt repeatable, with an FTP of 272W they would be at 108% whereas with a 291W they are at 101% – much more likely. Also I shouldn’t be able to ride for 15mins at 116% as with the first interval, again with a 291W FTP that drops to 108%.”

There haven’t been any further improvements. The two plans though designated Base and Build are pretty much of a muchness so there’s not a lot to say about Build that hasn’t already been said about Base.

Overall the plans fitted in with work and the weather surprisingly well. I felt that targeting just two hard workouts a week was much easier, in the sense that I could really hammer them rather than fear them, than the three called for in the Sweet Spot LV plans and I could really focus on them.

One thing I have noticed: I suffer from cramps quite a lot but following the Polarised Plans I’ve been getting much fewer attacks. Not sure if it’s entirely related or just coincidence.

I’ve not manually bumped my FTP within TR but workouts on my latest plan do feel “easy” – I could have done another couple of sets of Ritter with no problem and Tunnabora’s Sweet Spot could have been twice as long without worrying me.

In conclusion. Do they work? A qualified yes from me. It’s a bit hard to tell if the improvements were because of the plans themselves or just that I needed a change. Certainly for summer they make a lot of sense with only short sessions of hard work with the rest of the time really being “just riding”.

Conversely I went for a ride in the Dales yesterday and apart from Ribblehead (there was a charity three peaks walk on) it was pretty quiet, more like mid-week in April than a sunny Saturday in July.

Even the Sun’s editor-in-chief was on the TV this morning slagging them off with “One rule for them and another rule for the rest of us.”

Is it 20 points for both the intermediate sprint and the stage? Whilst not mathematically safe, Cav can sew it up with little effort at the first sprint.

Twenty points for the intermediate, fifty points for the stage.

On last night’s highlights they mentioned that the finish line was 300m further up the road than its traditional position so rather than being 400m from Le Place de la Concorde it’s 700m. Not sure why the organisers have done this.

GB News swapping presenters is the modern version of throwing various types of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The problem is: it’s still shit.

Eat.

A good breakfast. Take some trail snacks with you. Mid-day meal at the café if you wish. Decent evening meal. Beer.

No need to make it any more complicated than that.

At some point foreign travel will open up. Odds on that it will be for fully vaccinated individuals only or there’s a two week isolation period when you arrive at your destination and when you get home.

When I was on my way to get my first jab, the AZ blood clot story was just breaking, even then the risks were vanishingly small even if you assumed that the vaccine was the cause of ALL those individuals getting blood clots, something like 40 individuals out of 20 million doses. That’s 1 in 500,000. Compare that with the chance of me dying, I’m 62, before my next birthday – 1 in 100. The two aren’t even in the same ball park.

A few days ago I wondered if Dan Martin was actually riding this year’s edition. It was only when my wife looked up the rider roster that we realised he was still there. Yesterday’s attempt to bridge up to the front group was the first time he’s been mentioned all race.

It’s a long time (45yrs) since I learnt to drive so I’d imagine and hope that things have changed.

I can’t remember being taught about moving your head to avoid the A-pillar blind spot (of course on 1970s cars the pillar was pretty small) but one “trick” that the instructor had me do was set the mirrors so that they weren’t in the optimal position and you had to move your head to use them. Only slightly but it was enough that the test examiner would notice your head movement when you looked in one of the mirrors.

The A-pillar problem is same as the “constant bearing, reducing distance” problem in sea navigation.

Since I’m shit at descending (even roads) I’d say most definitely!

The HT550 used the north side for a couple of years but this year used the south side. Alan (Goldsmith) likes to vary the route on a regular basis.

I don’t think there’s much in it TBH, both have a ford or two to negotiate.

That ford is on the north side. If heading east then you turn left just after it and head up the glen to get to Tigh am Bodach.

That’s Blackmoss Pott in Langstrath at the southern end of Borrowdale.

Just watching ITV4’s rest day programme. Cav is currently 143rd out of 147 riders left. There is half an hour time difference between them. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that should Cav get over the Pyrenees and get to Paris that he holds both the Green Jersey and the Lantern Rouge!

I have (genuine) Jones bars on my rigid fat bike and my FS Salsa Spearfish. I swap between standard riser bars and Orange Velo Crazy bars, which also have a 45deg sweep, on my Solaris.

Jeff Jones recommends a starting point of aiming the bars at the rear axle, probably fine for his own long wheelbase bikes, but I find around a 10deg tail down setting to be about right. Again, you need to play around to find what works for you: too steep and you can’t easily dropping into an aero tuck as your elbows go too low; too shallow and your wrists are at a funny angle.

Standing and honking I usually hold them around the joint between the front and rear parts of the loop.

As for feeling “natural”, start with your arms by your side then lift your hands up to just below shoulder height and you’ll notice that they angle naturally around 45dg so your wrists should be straight when gripping the bars. I find that rather than bending your elbows “chicken wing” style you need to bend them with your elbows closer to your body and bend them as if doing a reverse barbell curl.

Ooh, fame! I get my picture on STW and appear in the video. better find me an agent!

Doesn’t kill the browser on my iPhone but jeez is this site a power drain – with it open in a tab then battery life drops by 1% per minute. This is using Safari with no plugins of any kind.

How come no-one has asked the obvious question?

WHERE THE HELL DID YOU GET TWO CHAINS FROM?

Very few systems these days are “written from scratch”, things like security are really, really hard to do right which is why sites like this use plug-ins but you do rely on those developers playing by the rules and not relying on hidden features or similar.

@Mark – sounds like the plugins are hosted on Github or similar – depending on how complicated the fix is (assuming you can fix it) then forking, fixing and issuing a pull request *should* get it pulled back into the next release. Also depends on how actively the plugin is being developed, one or two check-ins/releases a year and you could just merge the changes across to your branch, but you wouldn’t want to do that weekly. I’ve worked on big projects that do both and they both have their problems so no one right answer.

As for log-in, I “see” the standard WP login with the option of being logged in for 2 days or 14. For me both options work as stated. Google Chrome on MacOS.

Re Tapatalk as mentioned by the OP:

I set up a forum using PHPBB and looked into Tapatalk. PHPBB have a verification process for plugins (i.e. making sure that the plugin plays nicely with everything else), it seems Tapatalk submitted theirs and it failed the verification, they were told what the problems were and that was the last that was heard from them.

I’ve an old iPad that now struggles with certain sites, including this one, as things have just moved on regarding web technologies. Not worth it to me to get a new iPad as I can view this site on my desktop.

Away from Swaledale pretty much all of the Dales riding is old school XC riding, i.e. borderline gravel bike to HT territory and most descents are also rideable as climbs. There are some short technical sections but when I say short I’m meaning maybe 20 metres!

That linked route is very much in that style. There’s a bit of HaB up from Yockenthwaite over to Halton Gill (the descent is a farm track) and it’s a push up from Halton Gill for the first bit.

OK, here’s a figure of eight around Horton. Start at Horton and follow the PN route but before you get to the woods turn left over a short hill and drop down to join the PBW. Follow this over the Ribble to Selside then over Sulber Nick to drop into Crummackdale farm. Down the lane, turn left to take a BW to Wharfe. Small lanes to Feizor (good cafe) over to Helwith Bridge. Road to Horton, now do the last bit of the PN route in reverse to Halton Gill. Down the road towards Litton but just before the village turn right and climb up a BW onto Dawson Close. At the road go left then just before the second cattle grid turn right towards Penyghent. After about a km go left and follow the track down Long Lane to Helwith Bridge. Road back to Horton.

I did it in just over a day including a bivy with very wet ground conditions – had to push downhill on occasion. The last 20km or so is a bit complicated nav-wise and I made a mistake or two.

Bikepacking.com set their times for touring rather than racing.

Steve Large has done the double, worth checking on bearbones as he posts on there (username of slarge), he’s the current fastest time.

Here’s a vid of the fastest time for one way:

If a large enough group of riders finish outside the cutoff time then the race commissioners have the option to allow them to continue but they lose all of their accrued points.

“Large enough” is vague but from memory I’ve heard 25% of the field as being the sort of figure. There have been instances of domestiques being instructed to drop back to boost the grupetto’s numbers to ensure this is the case. Yesterday’s grupetto was something like 50% of the field but they were a couple of minutes inside the cutoff. Not sure how big today’s was.

Max out the RAM if you can, as others note it’s not really upgradeable.

My iMac is now 12yrs old and I’m a couple of OS iterations off the curve. This is now having knock-on effects with more recent software updates not being usable (or indeed installable).

Macs and PCs all use pretty much the same components, it’s just that Apple tend to use a small selection that they know will work together and also have high MTBF. Buy a PC to the same spec and it’s likely to last as long and cost similar to a Mac. I’ve not used later versions of Windows but I used to do an annual reformat and reinstall to make sure things kept running smoothly (I partitioned the disk into OS, personal and installed software partitions) so the reformat of drive C just blatted the OS.

Many years ago when I lived in N. Wales we were riding at Coed y Brenin (so will have been the original trails) when the back end felt “funny” and began squirming as if I’d got a flat. I couldn’t see what was wrong. Back at the car park I had a better look …

The lower pivot mount for the rear triangle had broken away from the frame! The welds on both sides had simply cracked. This was on a Scott FSR, the frame had a lifetime warranty which they honoured.

@kelvin You somewhat misquoted @reluctantjumper there, his full sentence (with my emboldening) was:

They can’t touch anything to do with tachograph limits, which are more strict than WTD (which almost every company makes you waive anyway), If they do then no driver from the UK will be able to drive on the continent as you have to be able to prove compliance with the EU rules for the last 28 days

There’s a significant number of unaccompanied freight that crosses the channel, i.e. just the trailer, it’s what those funny tractor units with the small cab that looks as if it should be on a fork lift truck are for. Eurotunnel I think have to be tractor and trailer as a unit because of how they embark/disembark.

British companies have been trying to shortcut training for decades – I worked in the construction industry in the 1980s and they were looking at employing EU brickies, etc. rather than put someone through an apprenticeship because “they might not stay with us so we won’t waste the money”.

I saw something at the bottom of the screen and thought it was something on the roof of a tour car well ahead of Teun. Then when the camera either pulled back or panned down a bit I could see it was a water bottle. A bit of a squeaky bum moment for Teun!

Cav rolled in 35mins down, the cut-off was 37:33 apparently.

Like don’t wave your arms around and shout whilst in the hills?

Looking at the map, if the people who made the call were on Mt Famine and the biker was at the top of the Edale track, that’s well over a mile between the two points. How loud was he shouting for the words to be distinguishable? That’s not allowing for any wind or other noise.

Also think how small someone will look at that distance – if I look out of the window over to the next village (about the same distance) I can only just see cars. The people may have had binoculars which would help but even so.

Waves!

I’d be wary of pushing the bar bag too far out front as it might affect the handling, I’d be trying to have things as close to the CoG of the bike as possible.

I’d second the DrJohn Strapdeck idea but it might get in the way of your cables and brake hoses. Looks like you’ve Hope brakes – the hoses on those come out in a straight line rather than angled like Shimano so sometimes you can mount things closer to the bars. With smaller bags on the front I’ve sometimes gone with having the bag *behind* the cables. Every situation is different though and generally it’s just a case of trying things out.

I think your perception is wrong – we live just south of the Dales and have wild camped or bivvied in the Dales with no problem over the last year even when seen by the farmer. Get away from the road and areas close to either tourist hotspots like Malham Cove or water features and you’ll be fine.

Current regs let farmers set up “temporary” campsites for several weeks, I think it’s 90 days per year, without needing to become fully official. I’ve not seen a list of such farms in the Dales.

With wild camping in areas such as the Dales being tricky recently,

As with Martin’s response,

???

If you are wild camping and adhering to the general principles of: being out of sight; arrive late; leave early; leave no trace, then the chances of anyone visiting you in the middle of the night are a million to one he said. Da, da, derrrrr!

a quick reconstruction of the route in google maps suggests about 250m of climbing

I.e. around 800 feet