Category: Leisure

Back from a proper holiday – not one involving running around forests or walking up hills, rather one visiting castles and vineyards, and even a bit of fine dining. It was a trip to the Loire with a friend, Nick. We got the Eurostar from London and then the TGV from Paris to Tours. The following day we picked up a hire car and gradually headed west, via Loches, Decartes (renamed after its most famous resident), Villandry, Bethenay, Chinon, Saumur and Behuard, to Angers. The wine caves at Saumur were a particular highlight, although we did supplement our wine haul here with more at the Le Clerc supermarket at Brissac-Quince. Loches was also a particularly beautiful place!

Some pictures on Flickr:

I’m currently in Scotland for the extended Easter/Royal Wedding/Bank Holiday break, and have been taking advantage of the current unusually fine weather – and a special cheap train fares deal – to make multiple excusions up into the Highlands to indulge in a spot of Munroing – climbing a few of the 283-odd peak in Scotland that are over 3000 feet and so become “Munros”. So far I’ve been twice up on the West Highland Line to Loch Lomond and to Tulloch, and tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I’ll be up in Glen Tilt tomorrow.

If you are ever travelling on the West Highland Line, which by some measures is the world’s most scenic railway, I recommend sitting on the left going up – or the right going back down. With the exception of the Loch Lomond section, the views are generally finer on that side. Particular highlights are the elevated views over Loch Long, Loch Lomond, Loch Tulla and Loch Trieg, and to several of the many mountains – The Cobbler, Ben Lui and Beinn Dorain to name but three. The Cobbler is too low to be a Munro itself, but its three thrilling summits (one requiring a scramble, one requiring an exposed move and one perched above overhanging cliffs) make it far finer than its surrounding Munros. It is one of the classic mountains of Scotland.

Obviously the Glenfinnan Viaduct (hello Harry Potter) and the rest of the section that continues to Mallaig is also incredibly scenic, but I haven’t made it that far this time, partly because there aren’t many Munros that far along and partly because the train takes over five hours to get there from Edinburgh…

The photograph above, which has come out surprisingly well on my geriatric 3-year-old iPhone, was taken on Wednesday and is looking south over to Loch Trieg, from the summit of Beinn Teallach, a mountain which has the dubious distinction of being the lowest of all the Munros.

I went for another circumnavigation of the Olympic site at the weekend. I was expecting to get some nice pictures as the sun came out just before sunset, with the air very clear as it had been raining early. For some reason though I struggled to take anything interesting in the park itself. The sunset itself was amazing though, and I noticed for the first time that the Gherkin is lined up perfectly with the Hertford Cut:

The Orbit continues to rise, it is now nine “tiers” high. The horizontal links will eventually I think be hidden behind a wrap, at least for the lower levels. It is interesting that there is still no scaffolding around the sculpture itself, with everything so far lifted in by crane and then bolted on by workers who are using the structure itself as the scaffolding. This presumably will not be possible to do once it gets much higher and starts to loop down and around:

It was also nice to see the salmon-pink Formans factory, itself a salmon processing plant, bathed in a salmon-pink sunset:

You can see all of the pictures in a Flickr gallery, including the previous Orbit ones.

Now this is interesting – I spotted on Amazon these London 2012 Olympic Games training guides, which are coming out at the beginning of March. There are four – Track, Field, Cycling and Swimming. I’m not sure quite who they are aimed at – not the pros I presume, but are they trying to cater for both complete beginners and club-level athletes (the blurb suggests so.) I’m also not sure about all the other Olympic sports that don’t fit into the four categories, e.g. Rowing and Sailing. I think we are quite good at those!

There’s also an “The Official Countdown to the London 2012 Games” which is launching at the same time. Could be interesting.

The London 2012 “brand” (i.e. jagged lines) is starting to grow on me, it has to be said. No circles in sight!

I’ve just cycled from Land’s End to London, taking a meandering route and covering 1012km (630 miles) over the course of 10 days. And I did it without any maps. Instead, I used the “Courses” functionality in the Garmin Forerunner 305 sports GPS unit.

The courses were TCX files, generated at BikeRouteToaster using the routing supplied by Google Maps and Cloudmade (OpenStreetMap data) – I alternated between the two depending on which showed the best looking cycle routes or most complete coverage of country lanes. Google’s road coverage is more complete but it’s API can (currently) only route journeys based on rules optimised for cars. OpenStreetMap still has big gaps in coverage in parts but is pretty good and showing dedicated cycle paths, in particular the flat (a luxury in Devon/Cornwall!) “rail trails”.

The first day’s route, as viewed in BikeRouteToaster

The TCX files are XML and are made up of two parts – the route itself, which is represented on the Forerunner unit itself as a meandering line, and turn indicators, which are derived from the data and in most cases are right – a spurious “straight on” indicator often appears when the country lane changes name, but most junctions are detected, apart from where the main road typically turns and the minor road carries straight on. This does result normally in a couple of unplanned detours, particularly for very shallow junctions where both the road and the junction turn in similar directions, where the route line does not help, but in general it means you can do a complete cycle without having to get a map (or smartphone) out at every junction.

One problem is restricted memory in the Forerunner 305, and that the use of this limited space doesn’t necessarily correspond the size of the data in the TCX files. For example, the turn directions took up around 10% of the space of the route lines in my TCX file, but appeared to take up double the space of the route lines on the device. By removing turn directions from the TCX files, reducing their files sizes by only 10%, I was able to store more than double the number of route lines.

The first day’s route in Garmin Training Center, before and after the turn directions were removed.

Older versions of the Garmin Training Center (sic) application, used to upload the TCX files, would fail silently, without loading all the files, when the memory limit was reached, and the current web-based uploader tool also gives an unobvious error message when the device runs out of space on uploading. However, the latest version of Garmin Training Center includes a pre-processing tool that examines the TCX files and only lets you upload files which collectively don’t exceed the limit – using checkboxes a useful “full bar” indicators. With this, I was able to see what files I could include, and that by removing the (relatively small sized) turn indicators, I was able to load in almost all 10 days worth of files.

The Garmin Training Center upload screen, before and after the removal of the turn-based directions, showing the difference it makes to the capacity used on the device (A striking difference, given that the turn-based directions only take up ~10% of the original TCX XML file.)

There’s going to be more than just football going on in Hackney Marshes on Saturday mornings in the future – the parkrun series of 5km running races is coming to Hackney and the inaugural is this coming Saturday at 9am – and then every Saturday at 9am. Same time, same place, every week. Simple.

The course is most suited to people who like off-road as well as on-road running. The first 2km is on a tarmac’d track, the next 2km is on grass around the East Marsh, with a great view of the emerging Velodrome in the Olympic Park, and the southern edge of the main Marshes, and the final km is on a tarmac’d track beside the Lee Navigation Canal.

I’ll be helping out at the finish, rather than running it, as my legs won’t quite have recovered from last weekend’s marathon. Once I am back into running, the event should have excellent PB potential (if the grass doesn’t slow things down too much) as it is a completely flat course. Much as I like Finsbury parkrun, the hills do add a good 45 seconds to my run each time. I expect I will alternate between the two, though, as each has its charms.

If you are in south London, Crystal Palace is also starting a parkrun this weekend. Ironically, it’s now pretty easy to get to from Hackney, thanks to the new Overground service that runs from Dalston.