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57 posts in Route craft
How to plan a 200 km ride (and finish it)
Two hundred kilometres is a fuelling and pacing problem long before it's a fitness one. Target intensity, carbohydrate per hour over eight hours, where to put the climbs, and where to plan the resupply.
Bikepacking route planning: water, resupply and daylight
Loaded, on unknown surfaces, your daily distance is not your road distance. How to plan around water, shops and daylight — the three things that actually decide whether a bikepacking day works.
Train, ferry, ride: building routes you can't do as a loop
A train leg turns a loop you have ridden forty times into a one-way descent through a valley you have never seen. Planning around timetables and bike reservations, the tailwind you can now guarantee, and what to do when you miss the connection.
Riding in the rain: kit, tyres and technique
Wet riding is mostly a thermoregulation problem with a braking problem attached. What keeps you warm when you're already soaked, how much braking distance you lose, and the tyre and cornering changes that matter.
How to find good roads in a place you've never ridden
Reading a map for gradient and surface, using heatmap data without following the crowd, avoiding the trunk road that looks like a shortcut, and sanity-checking a route before you commit a day to it.
Climbing technique: seated vs standing, and how to pace long climbs
Standing costs more oxygen at the same power — and is still the right choice sometimes. Gearing and cadence on a long climb, when to get out of the saddle, and how to pace twenty minutes uphill without blowing.
Winter route design: ice, shade and the roads that thaw first
In January the north-facing lane stays frozen until lunchtime and the valley bottom is colder than the hill above it. Designing routes around aspect, cold-air drainage, gritting priority and the hours of daylight you actually have.
Planning a mountain day: passes, weather windows and the descent home
The col may still be under snow in June, the storms build over the summit by early afternoon, and the 24 °C valley is 10 °C at the top before wind chill. A big mountain day is a planning problem before it is a fitness problem.
Designing a route for a group that rides at different speeds
The fast riders are cold from waiting and the slower ones are cooked from chasing. Route shapes that let a group split and rejoin without anyone feeling it, where to put the climbs, and sizing the ride to the right person.
Cycling in Mallorca: the routes, the season and what nobody tells you
Sa Calobra, the Ma-10 along the Tramuntana, and a flat middle that makes a recovery day easy. Why February to April is the season and July is not, where to base yourself, and the crowding nobody mentions in the photographs.
Cycling in Slovenia: the Alps, the Karst and the roads in between
Twenty-four hairpins to the top of Vršič, the Soča running turquoise below, and a Karst plateau where the wind has its own name. A small country with an improbable density of good roads, and how to time a trip around the passes opening.
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