James Addison

Yesterday, a friend and I cycled from our homes (the outskirts of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh Tollcross) to Beecraigs Country Park in West Lothian after meeting for breakfast.

The purpose was to learn some mountain biking - my friend rode a mountain bike, and I hired one for the day.

To reach the park, we cycled along the Union Canal from its Edinburgh terminus (near the Cameo Cinema) to Linlithgow, stopping for a snack/lunch at a cafe along the canal near Linlithgow before diverting uphill to the park itself.

The mountain biking was great fun, although we did experience one or two mishaps and maybe missed out some of the Red Route that I had intended for us to follow.  We completed approximately half of the Purple and Orange trails that appear on one of the Beecraigs maps, and in combination with some other cycling around the park to reach the start and after the finish, I estimate that we rode at least 5 miles on the trails.

In combination with 20 miles each way along the canal, I'm entering Sat 6th as 45 miles of riding.  This takes me over my initial 100 mile goal!  So I will ratchet that up to 200 miles and continue.

Yesterday (Friday) morning I had an errand to run in Leith, so I set off in that direction on my bicycle in the morning.  On my return journey towards work, I followed some of the old rail trails through town, and rode through St. Mark's park (stopping momentarily to check the weather) and then onto Leith Walk northwards towards Waverley Station.

I decided to add some hill-climbing to the journey home after work, and cycled up the mound, sometimes both racing ahead of and falling behind an electric mobility scooter rider.

A few of Edinburgh's new bicycle share scheme riders were out and about as I approached the Meadows on the final segment home.

Similar to Tuesday, this was a fairly standard bicycle commute day for me.  It does push me beyond the 50 mile halfway point though.

I will recalibrate to figure out how realistic a more ambitious mileage goal could be.  It would be nice to achieve that in combination with bringing other people along for the challenge, though.

Tonight despite some increment weather I did some volunteer cargo bike riding for the Edinburgh Tool Library.  This involved ferrying some tools from their Meadowbank location to their repair department in Leith, and from there a nested round-trip to their Portobello outpost before returning to Meadowbank.

The cargo bike has an electric assist unlike my normal pedal bike.  My mileage and time on it are imprecise because I did not record a GPX trace while using it.  I've cautiously/pessimistically estimated the totals to be about 9 miles over the course of 90 minutes or so.

Today's activity included a regular bicycle commute to work after lunch, and an extended ride home from the Tool Library's Meadowbank branch.

A fairly unremarkable day, today - my standard commute into and back from work, and a brief ride for an errand in the afternoon.  It seems my bike computer didn't begin tracking until I reached Forest Road or thereabouts on the way into work.  I haven't attempted to add on that missing distance - it was less than a mile, I estimate.

It's September, so after some warm-up riding over the weekend, I felt like making some early headway into my initial 100 mile goal.  Based on today, perhaps I can do more, but we'll see how it goes.

I work in the afternoons at the moment, so with fairly clear weather and comfortable weather today I set off for a morning ride before 10am, and completed a clockwise loop down the Roseburn Path (passing some nice new bicycle path infrastructure near Russell Road) before climbing up McDonald Road (where I used to live, many years ago) and up the Mound to return home via the Meadows.

To get to work, I added a detour through Holyrood Park to add a bit of distance.

Finally, after work I decided to do an anti-clockwise ride around town; first down the hill to Leith, and then joining the Hawthornvale Path up to near Goldenacre and then up Broughton Street and again up the Mound to return home.

Just north of 23 miles clocked on the bike computer, in a little over two hours.