I have been reliably informed by a fellow lovely Amsterdame08 lady that there is a nude cycle ride in York - 5 miles on 7th June at 4pm. Eeeek-seems some people really will do anything for sponsorship. Personally I could not have done the ride without my padded shorts, let alone with nothing on at all….crazy!

Posted: May 30th, 2008 under the ride.
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A quick hello to all fellow riders and those of you who have been following our progress. I just wanted to pop a quick link up here to my online pictures from Amsterdam 08. Please see the following link http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=119102&l=8bca9&id=713545031

Even if you are not on facebook you will still be able to see the piccies because the url is a public link for all to see. I will be adding the pictures to this blog in time, but I am currently confined to my sick bed hence the fact that this blog has not been updated yet with full ride details. I must add that the illness is food poisoning from an Edinburgh eatery and nothing whatsoever to do with the ride itself. I was fighting reasonably fit after my return, with no war wounds whatsoever…it seemed fate had other ideas! I have even had to cancel my recovery spa weekend away (boo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

I will be updating the blog as soon as I am back on my feet – until then, enjoy the photos.

Marie

Posted: May 30th, 2008 under the ride.
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Hi everyone, Just a quick message to say that we are back, safe and in one piece. I am heading back to Scotland this afternoon but just wanted to say a quick hello to everyone who has been following our progress. I have had a great time on the ride and have met lots of incredible women. The trip itself was amazing fun and an huge achievement. All my training served me well, and as such, other than a wee bit of ache in my knee (nothing too bad at all) and some lovely chapped skin on my face from windburn, you’d hardly know I’d cycled over 250 miles. sheeshhhh - I don’t even support any mega bruising, amy my backside feels fine. Hmmm- I did do it , i promise!

I’ll post full ride details and piccies in the next few days, but today’s main aim is to get back home to my Alistair

Marie

xxxx

Posted: May 28th, 2008 under the ride.
Comments: 2

Megastat time! With the results from all 4 days in, it’s time to compare and contrast, reflect and debate, and generally guesstimate at how absurdly out of touch these metrics are with the pains and hard graft on the road itself. (Hint: I am devising an equation)

Before we start, I should again stress that these are based solely on the available GPS data and don’t reflect the ride. Most importantly, they don’t account for any stopping durations, and so things like lunch/breaks will necessarily affect data. However, if we assume similar breaks per day then there is reasonable accuracy in a relative comparison. Apart from the last two, the graphs are not corrected, so use the raw GPS ‘crow flies’ data in kilometres per hour, ignoring rest breaks. These four graphs also use subsets of data which have been fairly roughly selected to correspond to hourly patterns, and so again are not hugely reliable.

First up, a linear representation of speed measures from each of the 4 days. Throughout I have (I hope) kept the same colour scheme of blue, red, green, orange respectively. Remember to click through on the images to see the full size version. Something immediately noticeable is if you imagine smoothing the graph out even further, i.e. draw a straight line of best fit through each day, the first two days slow down as the day goes on, while the second two days speed up as they move into the afternoon. Something about the food?

Notably, there is actually a highly consistent average speed throughout the four days. Comparing the mean of each day against the mean of the means for each day, you only have a variance of between -.82mph and +0.49mph. Essentially this means that when you look at the average speed of the entire ride, day 1 was 1.55% below average, day 2 was 7.73% above average, day 3 was 13.01% below average, and day 4 was 6.83% above average. I don’t think this matches the qualitative feedback from the riders!!

Onto the second image. This is the same as the first, but with each day overlayed onto one another rather than spread across the x-axis. While there are obviously data forcibly removed from this view, I think it gives a good indication of consistency again - the vast majority of points are within the 6-12km/h band, and if we apply some correction to that (i.e. increasing speeds by 25% and guessing that you could halve the impact of the down-points to take account for rest breaks - say, a drop from 12km/h to 6km/h may only be a drop from 12 to 9 - then you end up with quite a consistent ride pattern.

This third graph is exactly the same as the previous, only it’s had some semi-correction applied by multiplying all values by 1.25. This is an arbitrary correction based on the knowledge that the actual ride was around/over 250 miles, whereas the GPS/crow-flies mileage came in at 200. We’re still in km/h here though.

For those born before Decimal Day, this graph is the same as above but converted into miles per hour. Remember it’s only semi-corrected: there are lots of other factors unaccounted for which are reducing the absolute speed calculated here, but as I wasn’t on the ride, I’ll wait for the girls to fill us in before we post a fully-correct version!

Posted: May 28th, 2008 under the ride.
Comments: 2

Final day from Hull back to York! Pleased to say they have all arrived “safely” back, and so the ride is complete. A big congratulations from me to everyone involved.

Back to the important things though, a breakthrough in today’s ride stats graph: the sharp eyed will notice that I’ve had to adjust the maximum extent of the y axis! The riders’ “speed as the crow flies” (i.e. very likely to be an significant underestimation of actual speed) hit over 20 km/hour several times today. Looking at the GPS plots, there are some strange occurrences in the car park at lunchtime: either Gaz walked around a lot, or the GPS triangulation has a noticeable margin for error.

According to the GPS plots, total distance as the crow flies excluding ferry journeys comes to 200.42 miles, and I’m told we will have an actual mileage shortly to compare against. It’s definitely over 250 miles, so as a result you should inflate all the speeds by 25% or more.

Hang around, I have some even more impressively geeky things to throw onto the blog, and I’m sure Helen and Marie will pop on once they’ve caught their breath…

Posted: May 27th, 2008 under the ride.
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As you’ll see from the sponsorship widget, the JustGiving page has been updated to show that the whole team has smashed their sponsorship target by over £3k, with considerably more to be added through GiftAid. Congratulations everyone, and there’s still time to donate if you haven’t already!

Posted: May 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Today seemed a pretty fast day by all accounts, making it back to Rotterdam in far fewer hours. The data are slightly incomplete for the first hour this morning, so we pick things up around about Schipol. One thing to clarify: as this is Gaz’s team, these stats aren’t actually indicative of Helen and Marie’s progress, although I am not convinced they are actually indicative of anything at all.

Posted: May 26th, 2008 under the ride.
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The incredible response so far to the idiotic graphs has driven me on to create another. Here, we’ve averaged several results in order to smooth the graph a little - on the 24th, the average is on two reports, on the 25th it’s on four reports (due to the change in frequency on each day, both equate roughly to 1 hour cycling).

The gradual decline over each day is to be expected - there is notable improvement on the second day, it would appear, but I’m not sure the girls would say the same thing. Check back tomorrow for more Bad Science!

Posted: May 25th, 2008 under the ride.
Comments: 3

Well, I have confirmation that they made it to Amsterdam! Took a while longer than anticipated and some frayed tempers, but safe and sound with a couple of bumps and bruises. Clearly though, the important thing is the crazily untrustworthy conversion of GPS data into speeeeeed:

Seemingly the device was transmitting twice as frequently today, hence the increased fluctuation in speed. I am going to try and find a reasonable way to average the results to give a more viewable chronology.

Posted: May 25th, 2008 under the ride.
Comments: 2

OK, time for a little bit of fun. Using the GPS data from Gaz’s buddy beacon, I calculated the distance travelled between each point as the crow flies (i.e. this is NOT in any way an accurate reflection of the distance they’re actually travelling, unless they’ve picked unusually straight roads). Using the time from each entry, you can then calculate the approximate average speed for that section. A graph of Saturday’s activity is shown below - click on the image for a larger version.

Max. speed was 17.88 km/h, total distance “travelled” is round about 71.51km (44.43 miles). Thanks to Ingo Harre’s guidance on computing distance from GPS values. If you are interested, it looks like the ferry covered a distance of 362km (225 miles) at an average speed of 25.7km/h. This is remarkably close to the Google Maps estimate of 224 miles for the journey. More extraneous data analysis later!

Posted: May 25th, 2008 under the ride.
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