After a week of spending quality time with the family I decided to have a long bike ride today. My aim was 3 hours on the bike. I read in Cycling Weekly a ride in Hampshire and was convinced that I should be able to complete this ride. Living about 60 miles from the New Forest National Park and not knowing the area at all was a true challenge. 

In preparation I used the MapMyRide.com website which has a great facility to create your own journeys. I copied the ride from the magazine to create my own map and cue cards (see picture below). if you start doing this on MapMyRide.com make sure you switch on Follow Roads and Use Auto Notes. This creates automatically notes which you can follow and the mapping of the ride is so much easier. Not sure why this isn't the default setting. 

Click here if you would like to see my map.

I prepared for the ride ahead and collected all my gear, including enough nutrition. The day started sunny but turned quickly to rain, after conquering a few traffic jams on the way I sought my pre-defined starting point, near the town of Lyndhurst. I left the house at 11:30 and only arrived back at 20:00, so make sure you have enough time. 

The New Forest National Park has a lot of quiet roads and pretty scenery, as well as a wide variety of heath and forest. There are hills, but no big hills, so the difficulty level was just right for me. 

I attached my Cue Cards to the handlebars and was hopeful that reading and following the road should be easy. If your Cue Card mentions that you need to turn right in street X and street X does not have a name board then this becomes rather difficult. Furthermore the Cue card got some instructions which you need to follow for only 28m and then the next instruction. No wonder I got lost a few times. 

I lost my way after 10K, and by the time I had found the next street on my Cue Card I had already done 17K in addition. I used my iPhone 3G GPS module a few times to find my bearings. 

After about 3 hours of pushing the pedals and conquering the wind (oh yes there was plenty) I took the decision to start heading towards my car and call it a day. My quads were killing me. 

My total ride time was 4:18:20 for a total distance of 85.5K and an average speed of 19.9 K - The last hour I was unable to keep up my average speed. I had to stop many times to read the Cue Cards and to get my bearings. 

The weather was enjoyable all the way through the ride, a nice 20 degrees and no rain. 

PS: The pictures were taken with my iPhone 3G. 

PS2: Get into contact if you would like to receive the Cue Cards in PDF.