I am getting soft and have no excuses. Yes, I turned 60, and yes I completed my first marathon a week before this tour started but I am heading out to the Ardennes on my bike sans tent, sans cooking equipment, and sans sleeping bag. My lazy reasoning for this laziness is that without camping equipment I can cover longer distances each day and using hotels means there is somewhere to sit in comfort. There is much to comend camping but the single standout drawback is somewhere to sit while you enjoy a glass of wine looking out over an aquamarine sea watching the sun set. It may sound odd but a chair is on the essentials list of many cycle tourers.
There are different cycle touring modes such as credit card where you only take what you would for a day ride (plus toothbrush) and use your credit card for everything else, comfort touring where you are reasonably self-sufficient with a change of clothes for evening, camp touring involves tent and cooking equipment, then comes expedition touring where you might be taking solar panels, spare tyres and whatever else is required to take you across a continent.
This tour starts awkwardly as it involves taking a train to Lewes so I can cycle to Newhaven, an overnight stay in Newhaven to catch a 9:30am ferry to Dieppe and an overnight in the outskirts of Dieppe. The ferry timings out of Newhaven and the loss of an hour due to time zones don't make for the most convenient journey to France for a cyclist and alternatives would have been to do the tour in reverse or get one of the frequent Dover ferries to Calais then drop down the coast towards Dieppe before picking up my intended route to Charleville-Meziere on the edge of the Ardennes. The Dieppe to Charleville-Meziere route has 184km of cycleway on a 372km S-shaped route. Having cycled to the edge of the Ardennes I spend 3 nights in the town of Charleville-Meziere before a short hop to the village of Fumay in the Ardennes where I am based for 7 nights.
It is then 4 days cycling through Wallonia (southern Belgium) via Ypres to get the Dunkirk to Dover ferry home for a more efficient return to UK soil. In keeping with tradition I have 2 nights in Dunkirk so I have a contingency day. The inefficient travel out will provide a bit more recovery time after my marathon, and as I am based in an affordable gite in Fumay for a week leaving the tent behind does make sense, honest. If the Ardennes works out as a destination I can do the Calais to Charleville-Meziere route another time.
The Ardennes I am exploring is the hilly, wooded geographic area that covers parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. I will be based in France and very close to border with Belgium and a little too far west to do a day trip to Luxembourg. I am staying a few nights in the Ardennes department's prefecture (Charleville-Meziere) before going to Fumay which lies in a loop of the Meuse river. This places me in the slightly gentler western edge of the Ardennes though my 40-mile day rides will each typically involve close to 1,000m of ascent.
Like all of my trips this is a pre-booked affair with ferry, accommodation and cycle routes mapped out and booked months in advance; I just get itchy feet. Then with a marathon to focus on I did, as is usual for me, sort of forget I would be cycling and only just managed to attend to the finer details such as new chain and cassette for the bike before setting off.
Like many I find that running and cycling create a positive cycle, or virtuous circle as the expression goes. This does assume you enjoy these activities and the more you do the more you want to do; longer, faster, trails, hills. It makes you feel good and makes you want to make better choices especially where diet is concerned. You get to the demands of marathon training and your body tells you what to eat and it becomes all about nutrition.
This isn't a Channel to the Mediterranean style epic journey though at 800 miles it will be epic for me, just not in the manner of a grand tour.
Luckily I have been riding through the winter and as the saying goes, "winter miles give way to summer smiles". I am set on making the most of those winter miles and use that conditioning on the bike to good effect.