By Pedal and Foot

Beachy Head Marathon My first attempt at 26.2 miles   Beachy Head Marathon takes place the last weekend in October every year and starts and finishes in Eastbourne. The route is 26.2 miles long and features 300 steps, 14 gates and over 1300m of elevation gain (that’s more than the height of Snowdon!) it is predominately off road, can get very muddy and starts as it means to go on with a very steep hill. Now to a seasoned trail or mountain runner those figures may not seem like much but to a road runner living and training on the flat streets of Cardiff they seemed impossibly large. Yet I decided I wanted to complete Beachy Head as my first Marathon, so I signed up and paid my money. To a student the entry fee for a marathon is certainely a lot of money so it was a good incentive to train and train I did. I was up at 5am before uni and then running again in the evenings, I did fartlek, hill sprint, long runs, short runs but above all I concentrated on running fast and I lov

Custom Touring Bike My Temple Cycles Adventure Disc Review For my big summer tour after uni I decided that my 1998 Marin Pinemountain simply wouldn’t cut it, mostly because it was about 2 sizes too small for me! This meant that I was left with the slightly daunting prospect of having to buy a bike I would be happy to live on for 4 months over the coming summer, it had to be fast enough on the tarmac, able to handle some off road, able to carry a lot of weight, reliable and most importantly it had to be comfy to ride. I looked at all the obvious choices from big companies like Surly, Salsa, Kona and Genesis however I couldn’t find any one bike that was perfect, they’d all need some modifications before I would be happy touring long distances on them. This led me to think about a custom bike however I couldn’t afford a custom frame and anyway didn’t need one as I’m a fairly average size. When looking at custom touring bikes I came across Temple Cycles in Bristol and from the first t

Freedom after University 4 months living on a bike This summer Julia and I both graduated from uni, to celebrate we loaded our Temple bikes with luggage and set off on a cycle tour of Northern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltics. What followed was 4 months of brilliant cycling, gorgeous scenery and a few near misses around 12 fascinating countries. The bikes handled everything we threw at them from steep rocky off-road climbs to fast tarmac descents and certainly made the trip less stressful and a lot more fun. One particular experience that stands out from the trip was cycling the Rallarvegen in Norway. The Rallarvegen is an 82km long off-road cycle route across central Norway from Haugastøl in the mountains to Flåm on the coast , it starts at 1000m above sea level climbs to 1350m and then finishes at 0m, so it’s not exactly flat. As with most of our trip we didn’t quite plan all the details of the Rallarvegen, indeed we only decided to cycle North West from Os