Ride write-ups, newest first. Distances are what the computer said, not what the route planner promised.
248 km, 3 900 m. Started in the dark with the temperature already at nineteen degrees. The wind was supposed to swing round by noon. It did not. By the second col I had stopped looking at the average speed, which is usually the point at which a long day becomes a good one.
What broke: nothing. What hurt: hands, oddly, more than legs. New bar tape did not help as much as moving the levers up eight millimetres.
187 km and a crossing. The dynamo is brilliant on the move and useless at a standstill, and a long unlit tunnel with a queue in it is exactly a standstill. A ten-gram button light on the helmet solves a problem I had told myself was theoretical for three years.
402 km. Heard the ping at kilometre sixty, somewhere between two villages with no bike shop between them and no plan to acquire one. Taped the loose end to its neighbour, dropped the rear brake off, rode on. The wheel finished eleven millimetres out of true and perfectly rideable.
The lesson is not that you can ride on a broken spoke. It is that a thirty-two spoke wheel exists for exactly this evening.