2014: year of the #SambaCycle

Happy New Year one and all!  Welcome to 2014: year of the #SambaCycle!

To confirm/remind; I fly to Brazil on 17th January (arriving 18th), that’s two weeks on Friday.  I’ll be cycling for 5 months, then it’s one month of World Cup footy, and I fly back to London on 17th July (again arriving 18th).  I’ll aim to post on this blog when I reach each of the 12 stadium cities (and maybe more often if I find internet connection) so please keep an eye out for updates and tell your friends/family/colleagues/strangers to check this website out too, cheers!  I’ve added the dates for when I plan to be in each city onto the This Is The Plan page and there are other ways of tracking my progress as you’ll see below…

So what’s new?

• Father Christmas brought me a SPOT Gen3 GPS tracking device, which will send my coordinates to a shared page (nothing on there yet!) every 30 mins so that you can see exactly where I am throughout the cycle, and it also has an SOS button which if I activate will bring Search and Rescue to my location if I get in really bad trouble!

With my pressie on Xmas Day (stood next to Martin & Kate’s tree)

• Another new gadget is a bell for my bike, but this is not just any bell, it’s a prototype of the Trigger Bell that’s been designed and developed by my schoolmate Stef!  Look out for the Kickstarter campaign (to get tooling manufactured) which is coming soon.

• As for training, over the last eight days I completed the Rapha #Festive500 on Strava which involved me cycling 500km between Xmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  I did three 100km days and then fitted in several 30-50km rides between the other things I’ve been doing.  It was a great way to get some distance covered and kept me motivated each day to knock off more km’s towards the target, regardless of the weather (was pretty good apart from Xmas Eve & NYE’s wind and rain!).  I must thank Super Cycling Man for posting about the challenge which alerted me to it’s existence in the first place.  A few pics from my various rides below…

Afternoon sun

My bike and a signpost (MBAAS) #3.  Seconds before the heavens opened.

MBAAS #4.  Another day, different bike, same route, better weather!

MBAAS #5

Richmond Park in the winter sunshine

‘View’ from Richmond Park at night

Horse family

Done!