Plan your routes or go Ad Hoc ??

[bigmig]

Curious to know how the rest of you go about deciding where to ride / distance you will ride. Initially I started planing routes on Strava with the intention of following them. The only issue is that most of my routes go through small villages that are hardly signposted and my navigation skills are dreadful. So a lot the routes I plan to ride end up being Ad Hoc rides until I see a sign post for a town / village I know then I can work my way home from there.

The good side is that it means I usually end up doing more mileage than I set out to do and I get to know some of the lesser known roads which will hopefully help me navigate routes better in the future. The bad side is it means a lot of my rides end up being a bit unstructured. Not sure if that really matters as its not like I am training for the TDF or anything.

 

[HLaB]

it varies, sometimes plan/ follow, sometimes ad hoc.

 

[ianrauk]

Always good to go ad hoc now and again. Great for finding and fine tuning new routes.

 

[ColinJ]

Shorter local rides - ad hoc.

Longer rides including unfamiliar roads - planned in minute detail, and navigated by GPS.

 

[ColinJ]

Oh, and if you have a GPS, you could do an ad hoc outward ride, then use the trackback function on the device to go back the way you came.

 

[HLaB]

Oh, and if you have a GPS, you could do an ad hoc outward ride, then use the trackback function on the device to go back the way you came.

I sometimes do similar to that but don't come back on the exact same path but use the ouward path as a guide.

 

[morrisman]

Shorter local rides - ad hoc.

Longer rides including unfamiliar roads - planned in minute detail, and navigated by GPS.

This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[Deleted member 26715]

I'm a coward & always plan circular routes with my house in the centre, that means if I have issues I can scurry home, bit defeatist I know, but there is a lot to the physiology of riding I haven't mastered yet.

Alan...

 

[ColinJ]

I sometimes do similar to that but don't come back on the exact same path but use the ouward path as a guide.

Round here, you could have a 20 mile detour with thousands of feet of extra climbing if you just guessed where you were going!

I find that roads often look very different if you ride them in the opposite direction, so I do not get bored doing a trackback.

 

[HLaB]

Round here, you could have a 20 mile detour with thousands of feet of extra climbing if you just guessed where you were going!

I find that roads often look very different if you ride them in the opposite direction, so I do not get bored doing a trackback.

Yeah, its a bit like that up in Scotland or you could go up a road for a mile or two which becomes a track and vainishes. Down here other than the occaisional busy road there aren't many real barriers.

 

[Supersuperleeds]

I do a fair few rides ad hoc, my gps tells me how far away I am from my starting point as the crow flies, so when that distance and the distance I have already ridden adds up to what I want to ride, I then turn and head back home, this way I normally go 2 or 3 miles over the anticipated distance. It does mean that I sometimes go in circles and sometimes turn around as I come to a busy road I don't want to ride on, but it is all part of the fun.

I find an ad hoc ride is more enjoyable than following a route as I don't find myself constantly looking at the route

 

[byegad]

Around home I know all of the roads big and small so set off with a vague direction in mind and loop round until I get home. On strange roads I plan the route. Getting lost in the North Yorks Moors or Yorkshire Dales can add 20 or 30 miles to your ride with lots of silly hills. The NY Moors has a perfusion of 33% hills! While I can get up these, I'd rather not do one unplanned at the end of a ride.

 

[Dogtrousers]

I enjoy messing around with maps and planning rides/walks almost as much as actually getting out and doing them.

 

[MikeG]

Ad hoc is a bit of a funny notion when you know every inch of every lane for 15 or 20 miles around. You might string them together into different combinations, increase or decrease your ride-length as the whim takes you, but such familiarity means that no ride is really ad hoc. The longer ones need planning, but even that doesn't always go well.

 

[bigmig]

I have got an edge 500 and I have tried to follow a course I loaded into it, but the directions it gives I don't think are that great, its not like following a car sat nav, so for those routes I did plan and intend to follow I always end up off course. Does anyone else have difficulty following the course direcitons on an edge 500 or is it just me ?