The Annual Lunacy (aka "I Don't Do Winter") Challenge Chatzone

[Fiona R]

Ninth ride done, which crossed off a whole bunch of other achievements in one hit as well. It was my first (and quite possibly my only) 100km ride of 2020, it linked up my main VeloViewer tile cluster with my smaller London one and I got a chance to climb Swains Lane - possibly the only notable cycling hill in Central London (goes up alongside Highgate Cemetery). And my Eddington number has finally reached 62!

Ride wasn't without its trials and tribulations however. Managed to leave my drink bottle in the fridge (didn't realise until I was at least an hour in to the ride), my heart rate monitor somehow got stuck at 152bpm for a 15 mile stretch and despite the weather forecast showing as being dry all day, I got rained on at least on three separate occasions, plus each time it happened just as the road was starting to dry off from the previous shower, meaning I was back to getting wet from the spray even after the rain stopped. Also I lost the ability to shift gears from small to big ring at some point, but given that North London terrain turns out to be surprisingly lumpy, that wasn't the worst thing in the world.

But just when you start to feel sorry for yourself, life has a way of poking you and saying - oi, stop getting peeved about lots of tiny ridiculous things; everything could be a hell of a lot worse. For me, it was coming across a cyclist down at a roundabout, probably having been hit by a vehicle (no evidence to that, but given location of where they lay, seems most likely cause), that made me realise how pathetically small all my moans and groans really are. It had clearly happened a fair while previously - both police and ambulance were already both on scene and he/she was already wrapped in one of those silver blankets. Traffic was being diverted because the roundabout was blocked, but I chose to get off and walk my bike round the incident before carrying on. Certainly road safety was the predominant thought in my head for the next hour or so of the ride. Hope they make a full recovery.

Events like that make you appreciate life.

Very well done on the lifetime 62 👍 The Eddington game gets a little needley, taking ages to notch up one now as mine is metric and so masses drop off at 101/102/103 etc Height is more satisfying in that it moves upwards more regularly.

I thought I was master of "weather forecast OK/good" and still rains on you . It's only water

 

[Fiona R]

Number 7 done Porky 🐷 solo DIY200 to The Feed Station. I'm not likely to make lunacy but hoping to hang in on my RRtY all winter so will carry on posting just in case I ride silly numbers of 200s before the end of the year. 10 is my new target

I love the Feed Station at Merriott but it's a 100 mile round trip. Weather forecast OK, I devise a route involving an errand to Radstock which stretched the route nicely to 204km The first 50km pretty hilly through Chew Valley and the back of the Mendips but nothing steep. Through Wells and Glastonbury (what a stink of Weed) with a couple of pathetic routing errors I made it to the Feed Station quite late at 12.45. It was heaving but I did have a huge sausage and cranberry roll and a coffee. Nearly an hour later I set off to pretty much ride home without stopping. Utterly glorious up to High Ham (I had passed Hambridge and Low Ham already) remembering the marvellous Merry Monk Audax cake spread at High Ham village hall. It was dusk by the time I reached Ham Lane in Kingston Seymour and my new dynamo lights are very effective even though I shouldn't be needing them in anger yet on a 200! I'm sure they slow me down by 1km/hr (had them on all day to be seen) or my legs are getting older It's well worth going out and beating oneself up to come home to the OH's home made beef curry and dahl.

 

[steverob]

Very well done on the lifetime 62 👍 The Eddington game gets a little needley, taking ages to notch up one now as mine is metric and so masses drop off at 101/102/103 etc Height is more satisfying in that it moves upwards more regularly.

62 miles is my big cliff-face number because of my previous involvement in the Metric Century challenges. It only took me 1 ride to get my Eddington from 61 to 62, but it will take another 13 to get to 63, and 25 rides to get to 65! Metrically I'm only on 85km, so still quite a way to go there.

 

[Fiona R]

50/100miles or 50/100km are certainly the cut off points. Recently I did 102 km knowing that will immediately be another one I'll need to do 103 or more to replace soon. What a treadmill

 

[steverob]

Now into double figures! Making the most of my time off from work - done three Lunacy rides in eight days. Considering it took me until July 10th to get my first three rides logged, it's starting to finally look like this might be do-able (famous last words). If the weather holds out, might see an 11th ride on Friday or Saturday.

Not much to report regarding today's ride - went out for an explore of the town of Bicester, avoiding the constant traffic jams surrounding the Village by dipping in and out of its suburbs. Any route out that way for me is by its nature fairly flat and this ride was no exception. And with the wind being mainly of the cross variety, no real problems were caused by that either, so it was all rather straightforward really.

 

[Rickshaw Phil]

Ride number eleven done yesterday. This is one I've been looking forward to getting out of the way as it means I've finally caught up with the backlog caused by missing two months and having to add an extra ride for this challenge. 105.5 miles round mid and north Shropshire, taking in a few roads less travelled to give a bit of variety. A pretty good ride on a dry day with hardly any wind and no cramp at all on this one. Just two more left to do.

Ride report here: https://www.cyclechat.net/threads/your-ride-today.173254/post-6167876

 

[bluenotebob]

Whatever chance I had of completing this Challenge this year has just disappeared .. as from this Friday, I shall only be allowed outside to exercise for an hour a day. So that's me scuppered ..

Good luck to everyone who still has rides to complete

See you in 2021 ..

 

[Sea of vapours]

Sorry to hear that. Not an issue you can sidestep though :-\ Better luck next year!

 

[Aravis]

That's an interesting idea ... a little more info, please?

Every day you have to calculate how many kilometres you rode in the previous 30 days?

My 'daily averages' in July, August & September were 45km, 39km and 42km respectively ... so I was up there with you for the last 3 months ... but October has been a different story .. I'm only averaging 22km this month so far (273km/12 days). I guess if I calculated how far I rode in the last 18 days of September, I'd probably still qualify .. but I have a feeling that I'd end up spending more time doing daily calculations than actually cycling ..

Yes, exactly that. Arguably, you primarily have to be aware of what you did thirty days ago in case the rolling number is about to suffer a large drop as a large ride drops out of the period. That aspect is less of an issue if your distance pattern is consistent, rather than large distances at random intervals. It's very easy to do if you're looking at your rides with software which gives a 'Last X days' number. If you're not, then plugging all your rides into a spreadsheet and making that do a 'Last 30 days' calculation is the easiest approach.
demanding discipline. It's somewhat unrelenting unless the rolling target is a good bit less than that which you're typically achieving each month. I'm actually doing about 1,200km a month, so a rolling 1,000 in the last 30 days is often a given, but I have to be aware of it all the time. From the inverse perspective, however, I've only adopted dong the 1,200 in order to 'comfortably' achieve the 1,000 rolling ...

I was a little puzzled by this exchange, in that you seem to have evolved an idea quite different to the one I attempted to describe last year. Which is totally cool of course.

The rolling lunacy idea I've been following is very simple but I've always found it frustratingly difficult to explain succinctly. I'll try this: on every day of the year you must have had at least 13 qualifying rides during the previous 365 days. Completing the standard lunacy challenge means this is automatically be the case on December 31st, but whether it was true on every day of the year depends on the dates of your rides compared to the previous year's. One year's efforts effectively set the schedule for the next.

I've found that psychologically there's a subtle difference from the monthly challenges, where the start of new month heralds a flood of activity and most participants do the necessary ride quite early. With my rolling lunacy challenge, the focus tends to be on the date by which a ride must be done, rather than the date when it can be done, and running it close once makes it difficult to prevent that happening again.

I had thought it was well in hand, but a combination of shingles, which lost me at least a month and poor weather through most of October (usually my best month) means I'm almost certain now to fail. A novel experience for me with Cyclechat challenges, and at the moment it feels quite demotivating.

 

[Sea of vapours]

I think perhaps you've mised an 'also' qualifier in a post of mine a while back.

I entirely understand your rolling Lunacy thing and talked about having adopted it in post number 704 . I then said that "I'm also doing a rolling thirty day 1,000km, which is somewhat focusing" Those are entirely different things, the only link being that they are both 'rolling', but one's 'long rides in the last year' and one is 'total distance in the last thirty days'.

As to the demotivating thing: yes, I think that's a problem with challenges in general. There has to be a risk of failure or it's not a challange, yet actually failing is certainly problematic. My approach to ameliorate that, at least in part, is to dismiss external factors in advance of their happening as 'not counting'. So the shingles misfortune would certainly count there, and in my case, were every day in January to be icy, I'd fail all sorts of challenges as I really don't do ice, but I really don't think I'd feel terribly bad about it (annoyed, but not as if I'd failed as such since it's wholly* external).

* 'Wholly' given my choice to not cycle when it's icy anyway, which is pretty much my highest level 'not doing it' with respect to cycling.

 

[ColinJ]

Demotivation? Don't talk to me about demotivation!

My cycling mojo is so far off the boil that it has actually frozen!

I haven't been able to lower my targets fast enough this year to keep up... Every time I devise a new easier plan, something else comes along and scuppers that. I knew that I was not going to get 13 metric centuries in for this challenge but had decided that I would cherry-pick my favourite local hilly metric century routes and be satisfied with a reduced number of them. I was just about to begin that mini-challenge when I started to feel quite ill. I have no idea what it was, but it was at least the 3rd time this year since Covid-19 came along that it has happened so there may be a connection? Anyway, another 3 weeks barely touching the bike. I'm not going to start dragging myself over the hills now as I am unfit, the daylight hours are getting short, and the weather is getting crappy.

At this rate, my 2021 target would be to cycle 13 times to Lidl and back, 3 km at a time. Actually, even that target probably would not be achieved because an Aldi store is being built much closer to me and I will probably start shopping there instead!

Never mind. Being half-killed by blood clots didn't stop me making a decent comeback, so neither will a poor 2020.

I will try to come up with some interesting new routes for the future so I have something to look forward to.

 

[Aravis]

I think perhaps you've mised an 'also' qualifier in a post of mine a while back.

I entirely understand your rolling Lunacy thing and talked about having adopted it in post number 704 . I then said that "I'm also doing a rolling thirty day 1,000km, which is somewhat focusing" Those are entirely different things, the only link being that they are both 'rolling', but one's 'long rides in the last year' and one is 'total distance in the last thirty days'.

Ah yes, I remember that now. I probably glossed over it because as I tend to ride on just two or three days each month I think it would give me a schedule it's almost impossible to keep to.

As to the demotivating thing: yes, I think that's a problem with challenges in general. There has to be a risk of failure or it's not a challange, yet actually failing is certainly problematic. My approach to ameliorate that, at least in part, is to dismiss external factors in advance of their happening as 'not counting'. So the shingles misfortune would certainly count there, and in my case, were every day in January to be icy, I'd fail all sorts of challenges as I really don't do ice, but I really don't think I'd feel terribly bad about it (annoyed, but not as if I'd failed as such since it's wholly* external).

* 'Wholly' given my choice to not cycle when it's icy anyway, which is pretty much my highest level 'not doing it' with respect to cycling.

There were at least two or three rides in the early lockdown days where I could easily have done another 10-15 miles to make them lunacy qualifying, but I assumed I'd have plenty of time later on. So I consider the likely failure to achieve rolling annual lunacy to be largely my own fault. Shingles needn't have put me quite so close to the precipice.

I think that mentally I've been coping remarkably well with this year's events, but in the last couple of days something in my mind has certainly snapped. A long dark winter is looming ominously. I've always thought that if I had to give up cycling but remained reasonably mobile, I'd try to do some serious photography. The thought of not continually looking at the weather calendar for good cycling days seems strange, but perhaps that's what's needed, just for a while.

 

[Sea of vapours]

I'm looking for 'just about tolerable' on the weather calendar at the moment :-\ Photography's a very good option though. I'm a landscape photographer and would argue that inclement weather and the winter months are best for interesting images.

 

[ColinJ]

I'm looking for 'just about tolerable' on the weather calendar at the moment :-\ Photography's a very good option though. I'm a landscape photographer and would argue that inclement weather and the winter months are best for interesting images.

'Professional' or 'hobbyist'?

I got the feeling that you just whizzed round your mega-hilly scenic cycle routes without stopping! Do you sometimes carry a big camera and stop to take photos, or do you keep the cycling and photography as separate interests?

 

[Sea of vapours]

I've never carried anything capable of capturing light and producing a photograph on a bike (for values of never not including when I was cycle touring as a teenager). I suppose 'serious hobbyist' is about right, though I have sold a few prints when people ask. My camera bag, including tripod, comes in at about 15kg, so whilst I do carry it, sometimes plus bivvy gear, up hills, I'm not about to cycle with it.