Michael Tyler

Without doubt the best day by any metric.

Start the day at Celtic Hotel

With a full breakfast, but hang on, can you squeeze a continental in there too? Hell, let’s do both. Alpen, milk, fruit, honey, full breakfast, coffee, fruit juice, toast.

The full hit. Some of the other guests weren’t impressed by the amount of food that was put on for me, I could tell by the looks I was getting. In Caernarfon terms, the Celtic is fairly high-brow. F*ck them.

Ate it all apart from 2 rounds of toast.

I’ve said this before. If you want to start the day full of exercise, the best way to start it is with fructose, that’s fruit. It goes into the blood stream quickest and will give you the greatest start for the least effort in energy terms. In addition, you need a heavy dose of carbs, these are absorbed slower and will release energy further into the day at a steady pace. Any fatty food is no good IMO, it bloats you, slows you down.

Generally the full-breakfast ain’t as good as the continental for the best start for a cyclist.

Must have been a particularly low in fat full breakfast because it didn’t bloat me or slow me down at all.

All in all, the perfect start to the day! I felt right till I got to Harlech!

The sun is shining!

Shocker…

That bright blue orb, sorry yellowish orb we call the ‘sun’ was in the sky.

Even thought it was cold, at 9am when I got going, the sun was out!

Not only that, there was very little wind!

Magic!

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Believe it or not; 1st proper day of cycling.

Although it was a short one. I was finished by about 3pm. It was the first day I’ve been able to get some speed up without having wind, or rain, or both blasted in my face for 5 hours.

The absence of these two blessed features made me feel a lot better, and it’s the first day it’s actually felt nice.

Windy hiller

Wind is like carrying rocks around. Any momentum is destroyed. All your efforts to move at a reasonable pace are…… destroyed…. It’s like the worst for a cyclist aside from hail and snow and winter stuff.

Today it was relatively lacking.

Accommodation problems

When I reached the destination property which was on a holiday home park called Glan Gwna Holiday Park, I suspected there might be problems as I reached the chalet and it had washing hanging outside. Pairs of jeans, frocks, towels, etc. Normal everyday wash as it looked like.

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A spot of bad luck

You could call this one.

1. My phone dropped on the road TWICE and smashed the screen. Luckily, a) I didn’t run it over b) it has a screen cover and couldn’t shatter properly.
2. My watch didn’t record today’s journey and it’s only half a trip on Strava. Travelled 5 hours and recorded 3. Whether I touched something on my watch, I don’t know.
3. I got a puncture following NCR (national cycle route) 5 through woods coming down into Holyhead. Only about 2.5 miles from base but had to pump the tyre up 3 times before I could make it into town.
4. When I got to the hotel, my bicycle lock ceased and I had to saw it off the pannier with my muti-tool.

I’m not a massively superstitious person, but this was a little too much. For one day.

I put it down to my unlucky T-shirt.

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