From Ljubljana to Krk. With bike.

Published: 24^th of July, 2011

This article is about my bike ride from Ljubljana to Krk.
Because "Things you don't do are difficult and things you've done are easy." (Joe Armstrong)

Prior to this year I did some 'weekend cycling' (mostly nearby hills), which was rarely more than 30 km and took at most 2 hours to finish. Anything more than that was considered out of my reach. I am now proud to say those boundaries were just in my head.

I recently tweeted

"I wish @Garminconnect will stick around for some time. I want to show this to my kids.
#personalrecord, #pride and #willpower".

"What to do if Garmin decides to shut down their Garmin Connect service?"
is topic for another discussion.
The same issue may appy to other 'cloud based' related services, such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, or even Gmail. I am pretty sure I'm not the only one who stores important data on Google services.

Last week I was invited to spend a week by the seaside, on island Krk (Croatia). I usualy don't feel relaxed and comfortable spending a whole week doing nearly nothing at all, so I (partially) turned down they invitation.
I decided to join them a few days later if I could go there with a bike. At that point it seems like a very challenging task and if I made a soup of feelings it would be a mixture of excitement, anxiety and uncertainty.

Jure Primozic (@jprimozic) sent me a pointer to Ride With GPS which is totally awesome service to search & explore or to plan a bike ride. I highly recommend it.
So I planed a route, from Ljubljana to Krk, printed Cue sheet and exported it to "Garmin Training Center (.tcx)" format, suitable for Garmin Forerunner devices. It turned out I didn't use cue sheet at all, but route on GSP Garmin device was a huge helper.

I started from Ljubljana on Wednesday at 5 am so there was no heavy traffic. The temperature was below average (which turned out to be a feature, not a bug) so I was lucky I put on a long sleeve base layer. All I took with me was:

2 water bottles
3 power bars
multi tool & tyre lever
spare tube
helmet and sunglasses
cellphone and wallet
iPod shuffle

No backpack was needed, I put all the things in a small saddle bag and in my jersey pockets.
I had three pit stops, one was due to heavy hailstorm which only took about 30 minutes to pass by, and other two because I really needed to fill my bottles with drinks.

After less than 8 hours the stats were:

Moving time:: 6.55 h
Distance:: 159.36 km (~100 miles)
Elevation gain:: 2,041 m
Calories:: 8,964 C
Average moving speed:: 23,0 km/h

The whole report is avaliable on Garmin connect.

To wrap this up... the ride was easy. And I completed it with a mountain bike. Big & robust tires.
One of my favourite quote is from (Joe Armstrong):

"Things you don't do are difficult and things you've done are easy.

I've read it in a book Coders at Work.
I highly recommend this read if you are technically minded programmer.

I think anyone should implement that approach into everyday tasks. #willpower

The best thing was - I arrived just at lunch time. Massive appetite. Perfect.