George Pilkington Mills, my video tribute.

As promised in my previous post, here is a link to the short film we made when we visited the grave of the penny farthing end to end record holder.

http://youtu.be/M-xmREVh8OE

A massive thank you to my friend Mickey for puting the film together in his spare time.

Visiting my cycling hero, George Pilkington Mills.

On Sunday 8 th February I paid a visit to the grave of my cycling hero, George Pilkington Mills. Now I doubt that many modern day cyclists have heard of George as he was cycling many years ago. In fact, in the year 1886 he set the record for being the fastest person to cycle from Lands end to John O'groats on a penny farthing. There are two amazing facts about this record, the first being that he only took 5 days 1 hour and 45 minutes to complete the 900 mile journey! The second point worth mentioning is that this record still stands, 128 years later!

I'm not going to be breaking this record and to be honest I can't see it ever going. Whilst I was at the grave, with the help of my friend Mickey, I made a short film about George, his cycling records ( and there are many) and I also mentioned my fast approaching end to end ride. Once the video is edited I will post a link on here.

Visiting the grave was a great experience, I'd like to thank everyone at the church in Shirley, Croydon for making my visit so enjoyable. Special thanks to Vic who I contacted by email with my initial enquiry, wondering if the grave was in their churchyard and he then went on to help me locate the grave. It was also nice that the vicar turned out to welcome me. I'm not particularly religious but he asked if he could bless me and my bike to wish us good luck on my ride. I welcomed this idea, thinking I might need all the help I can get!

All in all it was a great day and well worth the 320 mile round trip. If you're wondering how I made the journey then here's a photo of my hand made penny farthing roof rack, who needs a big car!

Worcester St. John's cc reliability ride.

Today I rode my penny farthing in the Worcester St. John's cc reliability ride. A reliability ride is basically an organised group ride, traditionally held in the late winter to help riders get fit for the coming season.

Today's ride had two route options and I chose the short route that avoided 20 miles of hills. However, even the short route was over 30 miles and as it was very windy it proved to be quite a work out!

The first group of riders started out at 9.30 am, I started in this group as I was aware that even the 30 mile route would probably take me over 3 hours. The faster riders and those doing the longer, harder ride , started about 10 mins after me.

This photo was taken at the start head quarters. Worcester auto club. A great little venue and I was already looking forward to returning here for my coffee and cake after the ride!


Once the ride got underway it was clear it was going to be a tough morning. The wind was extremely strong and riding towards Droitwich on the A38 was very tough going. For me, sat up in the wind on the penny farthing, it was really slow going. I couldn't wait to turn out of the wind and get some rest bite.

Fortunately for me the route was at least fairly flat, one or two climbs had my heart rate climbing but at least it was all rideable. The headwind did actually help at times, when I was riding down the quite steep road to cross the river bridge the wind held my speed back so I didn't have to get off and walk.

The head wind eased off at the turn in great witley and this was very welcome, the snow that had started to fall was a bit worrying for a while but it soon stopped.

The road back towards Worcester was on I knew very well, having raced my modern time trial bike along it many times in the beacon little mountain time trial. Fortunately this part of the course is the flat bit before the hills so with the help of the tail wind I was flying along... At about 12 mph.

As I got closer to the finish I started to get passed by riders who had done the longer route, it was great to get a few words of encouragement as they passed me. I just hoped they wouldn't eat all the cake at the HQ before I returned!

I needn't have worried, as I finished the ride and walked into the HQ I saw that there were plenty of cakes left. So I got stuck in and started replacing some hard burnt calories!

It turned out to be quite a hard workout, I'm going to have to hope and pray that the wind doesn't blow like this in April as my average heart rate for the 3 hour ride was 160 bpm. That's way to high to maintain for the 7 to 10 hours per day that I will be riding.

Overall it was a great day, thanks to the organisers and cake bakers for all their efforts and thanks to everyone who came along to make it such a popular and successful event.

This final photo is my heart rate data from the ride...

100 miles in 2 days

I had a few days off over new year so I decided it would be a good idea to try 2 back to back days on the penny farthing. The first day turned out to be a ride of almost 60 miles and took a little longer than planned. This was a bit of a problem, but only as my front light stopped working! The lessons learned from today were, 1 I'm going to need a new front light and 2 I need to avoid hills where ever possible as they really zap my average speed.

The second day was a shorter day of about 40 miles and was on flatter roads. My average speed was much better and I finished the ride in daylight. The only thing to note from today's ride was how difficult it was to ride into a strong headwind . Hopefully I will get a tailwind for the end to end in April!

So all in all, the training is going well, the end to end ride will prove to be a real test but with a bit of luck and fingers crossed for good weather it should also be great fun!

Training rides for the Lejog ride.

I've been doing quite a few miles as training for the Lejog ride. I'm averaging about 150 miles a week and the longest ride I've done was 102 miles. For Some of the rides I'm using the penny farthing but mainly I'm riding a basic fixed gear road bike.

The thinking behind this is that the road bike is easier to fix at the road side should anything go wrong and it's keeping the miles off the penny farthing which is a much more fragile machine. The fixed gear bike is good training anyway as you are forced to keep pushing on up hills and you don't really get any rest coming down them.

 It's actually fairly similar to the penny farthing. I'm doing as much riding as I can sat down to get used to long periods on the saddle as it's not possible to stand up on the pedals when riding the penny farthing.

So the fittness is building nicely although I'm not doing any intense efforts, for the penny farthing Lejog it's all about long slow days so that's how I've been training. This won't have helped my performance in a recent cycling hill climb up Shelsely Walsh as that was a flat out effort of 4 minutes. With specific hill climb training i'm sure I could have gone a bit faster but you can't train properly for everything. I was still the 2nd fastest of the over 40's so I didn't do too badly.



The other thing I've been spending a bit of time on for the Lejog ride is making sure I don't run out of phone battery life. I really want to record the whole ride to strava. Strava is used by cyclists to log training rides and races. It's great as it also uses gps to track and record you onto a map so you can see exactly where you have been. Using strava on my phone Zapps it's battery a bit and as I also plan to use the phone for photos and uploading to here and twitter on the ride I needed to look into ways of charging it on the move.

What I've come up with is this. I've made a new rear wheel for the penny farthing, using a 20" rim that is a special for penny farthings and I've built it up onto a shimano dynamo hub that was ment to go in the front wheel of a brompton folding bike. I used the brompton hub as it is really narrow and it fits into the rear forks of the penny farthing without having to modify them. I've fitted a solid tyre onto the rim so it's still pretty authentic. To convert the power generated from the hub to a phone charger I bought a device from the USA. It's called a sinwave revolution . Basically it converts the dynamo output to a USB socket so I can now charge anything that normally charges from a USB cable.

I've been using this set up for a couple of months now and it easily generates enough power to keep my iPhone on full charge. Even when the screen is on constant, I'm using a sat nav app and strava running in the background the battery doesn't drop. I've tried running the battery down on the phone first and then using it and it recharges it fine even with everything running at the same time.

Tour of Britain road trip

I spent last week following the tour of Britain bike race, a friend and I hired a van and took bikes to follow the race. I rode my penny farthing as training for the Lejog ride. The first day we rode the last 20 miles of the stage and then 20 miles back to the van. The roads were quite hilly and proved a good test of both my climbing and descending skills! Other race fans waiting to watch the tour seemed to enjoy seeing the penny farthing in action and gave me some good encouragement.

The second stage I went to watch was the 3 rd stage off the race and was a mountain top finish on a climb called the tumble. It's about 5km long at an average gradient of 10% so it was pretty tough going on the penny farthing! Coming down the hill was also fairly difficult as it's hard to control the speed of the bike on downhills. My bike only has a front brake that is just a spoon that pushes down onto the tyre. All it really does is get hot and wreck the tyre rather than slow you down!

The next day the race started in my home city of Worcester so I went down to watch the start, I even got a mention from the announcer for being the current british penny farthing champion!

Worcester was great but then the race moved on to Devon, I went to watch on dartmoor. The riding was again pretty hard but good training for the lejog ride.

The weeks riding was great practice and also enabled me to test out my newly built rear wheel. I have built it up on a small dynamo hub that is conected to a USB converter. I used this to charge my phone while riding. It worked really well and enabled me to record my rides to strava without draining my battery.

Reaction to the announcement of my end to end ride.

Well, since I officially announced that I was going to ride lands end to John O'groats (lejog) on my penny farthing the reaction I have had has been fantastic!

I posted on twitter and Facebook as well as telling friends in person. Everyone was really interested in my plans. Generally, my family think I'm a bit mad, twitter people are convinced I'm a bit mad and friends from my cycling club must think I'm superman as they are encouraging me to try for a record time.

The penny farthing record of 5 days 8 hours and 15 minutes is not something I will be going for! I will be more than happy just to complete the ride, 14 days will do me. Even at that pace it's about 70 miles a day.

Within a few hours of telling people about the lejog my justgiving page had received plenty of donations, some from people who I have no idea who they are who must have seen a retweet about the ride on twitter. I'd like to say thanks to anyone who has donated, it's very kind of you.

If anyone would like to donate, here's the link.. www.justgiving.com/Dave-Preece3

During this week I've been cycling quite a bit, on Sunday I did 76 miles on the penny farthing with my friend Mickey , who is going to be joining me on the lejog ride. Mickey will be on a normal, modern road bike but he will be carrying all of our kit. We are not having a support vehicle.

Tuesday night after work I was out on the penny farthing again. I rode out to a local 10 mile time trial and raced it against modern tt bikes. Obviously I came last, but my time of 39 minutes for a 10 mile course that is quite hilly wasn't too bad.

Wednesday was my day off work so I went out on my modern road bike for about 50 miles. I intend to do most of my training for the lejog ride on this modern bike. I don't want to put too many miles onto the penny farthing in the build up as repairing any breakdowns is not as easy on the penny farthing as it is for a standard road bike.

The other training I am doing is walking, on steep hills I will have to push the penny farthing so I thought it might be an idea to get used to walking a lot!

Tonight I popped out for a quick ride on my fixed gear bike after work and Tomorrow, Sunday, I'll go out on my road bike again for about 4 hours. At this time of year the training is easy as the weather is still being kind!

Well I guess that's enough of an update for now, thanks for reading and come back soon!