Author: Richard

First Service

| Richard

No, nothing to do with tennis.

The RT had its initial service in late March 2024, so was due another service – its first “full” service – a year later, so I booked it in for 1 April 2025.

In the meantime, it’s been back to Bahnstormer for the SOS button issue to finally be fixed and they also took a look at the oil mist from the damaged rocker cover on the offside.

It was going to be a quickie this time, so I turned up and hung around whilst the service was carried out and I may have accidentally scoffed a bacon and sausage bap whilst I was there!

The rocker cover is still weeping, apparently, despite having had new rocker cover bolts and a gasket fitted, so I’ve bought a litre of oil to keep on the RT just in case and they’ve quoted me for a replacement rocker cover.

Mileage is now up to 4,768 miles.

The next planned ride is with Bahnstormer themselves down to Cornwall, so I’ll be trying out a new dji microphone setup after the last disastrous video shoot, where I went into detail about the powered phone bracket, navigation, and a mini-test of the R1300GS, all of which had no (or hardly any) sound and narration captured…

Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn

Herself was supposed to be coming for second unit filming, but is double-booked, so I’ll revert to a two camera setup with one on the Arai and one on the bars instead.

 

FulGaz Challenges

| Richard

I realised I hadn’t done a proper update on the main challenges I did on FulGaz last year and this year: the Grand Tour 2025 and more importantly, perhaps, the Ironman Pro Sprint Series.

I can’t link to them, sadly, because with FulGaz’ acquisition by ROUVY, the event pages have disappeared.

Happily, though, I managed to screenshot the overall leaderboards/General Classification (“GC”) tables so I would have a permanent record of how I placed overall.

So here’s the GC for the Grand Tour 2025:

FulGaz Grand Tour 2025 GC

FulGaz Grand Tour 2025 GC

And more importantly, here’s the GC for the Ironman Pro Sprint Series:

FulGaz Ironman Pro Sprint Series GC

FulGaz Ironman Pro Sprint Series GC

So, second on the Grand Tour and third on the Ironman Pro Sprint Series; not bad for an old fart like me.

Today my Ironman Pro Sprint Series medal arrived!

March 2025 Stats

| Richard

March started with that work visit to New Delhi for a Hearing.  The hotel had a pool and allegedly a fitness centre; the former I didn’t really get to use because we ended up working well over 70 hours that week, including the weekend, and the latter was better than it looked on their website.  The treadmill also linked properly to my Apple Watch Ultra and launched an Apple Fitness+ run which appeared to show video on the main screen and the photos that were mentioned came up on the Watch.  I only managed to get it to work like this once, though.

Once back, it was off to the Pain Cave for more FulGaz rides, mainly my usual  John Hallas’ Weekly Challenges.

But that was only short term as we were off to Fuerteventura for a combination of remote working and holiday: I’d already booked a villa for a week but still had two days’ holiday to take and had looked at the cost of a city break before deciding that I could move our Business Class flights a week earlier and book another week (albeit in a different villa in the same complex) for less.  So I also amended my bike hire with Easy Riders Bike Centre in Corralejo to ensure I could do some road riding whilst I was there … and that I did: something like 324km on their Specialized Allez Elite.

Here are March’s stats:

March 2025 Statistics

March 2025 Statistics

Activities: 36 Distance: 503.97 km Time: 28:49:39 Calories:  25,850

Turning to my weight, at the end of February I weighed 87.4kg and at the end of March I weighed 86.1kg, which is down by 1.3kg. Body fat percentage was down from 25.0% to 22.6% which I think was a minor blip.

February 2025 Stats

| Richard

February started with some new work coming onto the horizon that was soon confirmed with a week’s visit to New Delhi for a Hearing.  The hotel had a pool and allegedly a fitness centre; the former I didn’t really get to use because we ended up working well over 70 hours that week, including the weekend, and the latter was better than it looked on their website.  The treadmill also linked properly to my Apple Watch Ultra and launched an Apple Fitness+ run which appeared to show video on the main screen and the photos that were mentioned came up on the Watch.  I only managed to get it to work like this once, though.

In the Pain Cave it was a combination of running on the treadmill with JRNY adaptive workouts, and FulGaz, with a continuation and eventual completion of their Grand Tour 2025, as well as my usual  John Hallas’ Weekly Challenges.

And there was the good news that ROUVY had decided to keep FulGaz going as a standalone app, providing they could maintain the user base at its current level.  Fingers crossed!

Here are February’s stats:

February 2025 Statistics

February 2025 Statistics

Activities: 22 Distance: 401.09 km Time: 16:08:36 Calories:  17,545

Turning to my weight, at the end of January I weighed 86.8kg and at the end of February I weighed 87.4kg, which is up by 0.6kg, sadly. Body fat percentage was down from 25.5% to 25.0% though.

January 2025 Stats

| Richard

Back on it in January with my usual spike in weight whilst trying to cope with shorter, darker, drearier days and more work, work, work with deadlines to hit.

So it was back to a combination of running on the treadmill with JRNY adaptive workouts, and FulGaz, where they opened up their Grand Tour 2025 on January 11th, as well as my usual  John Hallas’ Weekly Challenges.

And there was the bad news – that originally I marked as spam – that FulGaz had now been acquired by ROUVY, an inferior app.  This was following FulGaz’s earlier acquisition by the Ironman group who then decided they didn’t want to continue with FulGaz and slashed and burned them; the story of the disposal and sale to ROUVY is appalling, as detailed over on DC Rainmaker’s blog entry:

Ironman Sells FulGaz to Rouvy, and Plenty More

I’ve been too busy with the Grand Tour to give ROUVY a try or even see if the Schwinn will connect to it, but from what I’ve seen so far, it’s not going to be a happy transition from FulGaz to ROUVY when the time comes and they stop supporting the FulGaz app.  ROUVY seems to be the worst of both worlds: some “Augmented Reality” in the way of rider avatars like Zwift coupled with lower resolution real life videos, some of which appear to have been filmed from cars, rather than from an actual bike rider.

We shall see.

Here are January’s stats (obviously assisted with fact that there are well over 90 days in January each year…):

January 2025 Statistics

January 2025 Statistics

Activities: 32 Distance: 485.69 km Time: 22:40:57 Calories:  22,814

Turning to my weight, at the end of December I weighed 88.1kg and at the end of January I weighed 86.8kg, which is down by 1.3kg!  Body fat percentage was up from 25.2% to 25.5% which is weird.

BMW Motorrad Connected (Cr)App

| Richard

I’m hoping that some of the issues I’ve been seeing with the Connected app may be due to overheating of my iPhone 15 Pro in the charging cubbyhole because of wireless charging couple with the app’s insistence that it has to be unlocked and open on the app for it to work…

I say I’m hoping, because allegedly the iPhone 16 Pro should have better thermal properties.  We’ll see.

More ridiculous behaviour from the BMW Motorrad Connected [sic] app in the meantime, though: I’ve upgraded my iPhone 15 Pro to a 16 Pro last month so I needed to transfer the apps and data over.
To make an informed decision on which capacity I went for, it’s good to check how much storage I’m using and the iPhone told me I’m using a shedload of storage for the BMW app. Not surprising, given I needed UK, Spain, France, German, Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium maps for my recent trips.
So a quick look at the app and it tells me there were 16 updates available for some 44GB.
And there’s no way to delete the stored maps unless I download the updates and then delete them afterwards!
FFS…

Eight Years In

| Richard

We’ve recently celebrated eight years of ownership with another dealer service and MoT, this time with Stellantis & You at Guildford as it’s a short drive from where we now live.

And it passed with no problem at 40,374 miles, up 5,451 miles on last year.

I expect the mileage will go down even more now, as we’ve bought a Ford Focus ST Estate for the longer drives where we need to carry stuff and/or other people.

September 2024 Stats

| Richard

September 2024 saw the end of the holiday theme starting with a few days in Prague and ending with a weird week in Corralejo. Weird? Well the last time we were there it was as residents moving back to the UK full time and this time we were back as bloody tourists staying once more at Bahiazul.

The complex contains the ‘main’ Bahiazul operated villas but also others we’ve used before: Villas Veaco and KATIS Villas. The upside of booking with Bahiazul is two-fold:

  • Breakfast in their restaurant is included so that sets you up nicely for the day; and
  • You have access to the gym which is relatively good, though not as good as our Pain Cave.

As far as I was concerned, I could simply run or walk but my knees and post-crash issues make that uncomfortable to say the least, plus I wanted to ride a bike anyway.  This meant hiring a mountain bike from Easy Riders which was a painless experience and recommended.  As I knew I’d be heading out on the roads past the dunes, I needed to wear a bike helmet and didn’t fancy hiring one, so I bought an alpinestars Vector Pro Atom helmet and some needlessly flash Galibier Campionissimo Luxury gloves. Both were excellent.

The hire bike – a Trek Marlin 7 – had two issues for me:

  1. The gearing was great for climbs and no doubt spot-on for off-road riding, but on the road I was unable to pedal quicker than 31km/h due to the low gearing (104rpm cadence).  My fault for choosing an MTB but the road surfaces can be a tad iffy out there.
  2. The seat post kept descending due to my weight and the bumps, so I was needing to stop to heave it back up again because I didn’t have the necessary Allen key.

Lesson learned and next time I may hire a road bike or choose one with a larger front sprocket.

Anyway, here are September’s stats:

September 2024 Stats

September 2024 Stats

Activities: 41 Distance: 406.47 km Time: 31:12:40 Calories:  20,118

Turning to my weight, at the end of August I weighed 85.4kg and at the end of August I weighed 87.1kg, which is up 1.7kg.  Too many good breakfasts and restaurant dinners!

August 2024 Stats

| Richard

August 2024 continued the holiday theme following my son, Jack’s wedding before heading off to Venice for a few days at the Hilton Molino Stucky and ending with a few days in Prague at probably the best hotel we’ve ever stayed at, the Mandarin Oriental.

Hitting the gym at these luxury hotels was difficult so we also went walkabout a lot – Alison is going to compete in 2025 in the Masters’ Bikini Class, so needs to bang in many thousands of steps every day along with her workouts.

So here are August’s stats:

August 2024 Stats

August 2024 Stats

Activities: 22 Distance: 288.87 km Time: 21:34:09 Calories:  14,161

Turning to my weight, at the end of July I weighed 84.7kg and at the end of August I weighed 85.4kg, which is up 0.7kg.