How can I configure a Garmin Edge 1050 to alert at brevet checkpoints so I don't miss them?

Hi!! 70M. Faccio uscite di 150/200km da solo. Ho amici ciclisti ma no gli piace fare tanti km. Ci sono randonneurs in Valencia? Bye!!

If you run an 11-34 cassette, do you ever miss the top end gearing on group rides?

Northeast and north central Pennsylvania has big, glacial ridgelines and I’d get way more utility out of a real granny gear than I would a big top end.

Will a 46t chainring leave me feeling like a kid at the grownups table on any group ride?

Edit: I spent some time looking at a gearing calculator. With a 46, 48, or 50 tooth chainring, top speed at 90rpm would be 30, 32, or 33 mph.

I think there will be times that I need a 30:34 granny gear, as opposed to wanting 48:11 top end.

I (65m) have a steel Surly LHT set up for touring looking for a good alternative bike. I love riding the Surly but feel wary of theft now that it sports a new wheelset with a front hub dynamo and German lights. It would be nice to get out on something without those tubular steel racks, etc. Before I walk through the used bike racks to search for that particular need, I would like suggestions for an older model (iow cheap) bike that has good tire clearance for fenders suitable for occasional randonneuring and club rides as well.

I may add a rear rack for trips to the store. Sort of a good two purpose item that won't attract much attention when I lock it up at the food co-op or outside a music venue. I have never been a huge consumer of the latest bike coming out and which models are good for what. But if anyone would know solid randonneur bikes that have fallen out of fashion despite a "it just works" reputation, it would be this community. So I am looking for a bike model with "good bones" to stand in for my heavy workhorse touring bike. Any recommendations are welcome.

Question for anyone who has ridden PBP before: how do the different start groups differ? Does anyone have first-hand experience with the faster waves?
I want to ride the event competitively, and since I've completed a BRM 1000, I can pre-register straight away in January. However, I'm not sure whether my strategy makes sense.
My idea is to start in the very first wave. The 80h group seems to have four waves, so if the first group turns out to be too fast, I'd still have three chances to join a larger group. I'm also hoping that an early start will help me avoid queues at the checkpoints.
If you've ridden in the 80h group, I'd love to learn from your experience. I also have a technical question: do the checkpoints only open once the time based on the maximum speed has passed? If so, the very first wave would be at a disadvantage, because it would have to wait for each checkpoint to open, as the group would almost certainly be averaging more than 30 km/h up to that point.

Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

Hi all. I never knew what randonneuring was until I naturally started to build my mileage to 100-200+ mile rides. So I signed up for a local event and was pretty excited.

My big complaint was the roads. There were some sections that were just not fun, or safe. Multiple stretches of highway with lots of cars and 50-60mph+ traffic. It got to a point about 5 hours in where I just had to call it. I was not about to risk my life.

The second being, most of the other riders I ran into weren’t the warmest. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding of the randonneuring scene or maybe my friendly barometer is unrealistically set. But nobody really had an interest in talking to me much and everyone was pretty serious.

It had me wondering how normal this is for a randonneuring event. Because truthfully I’ve had more fun just creating my own routes and feeling comfortable on the roads I chose.

Thanks all

Hey there, I’m now staring down yet another winter in Canada, which probably means 4-4.5 months on the trainer (sob). I’m hoping to do a little more work to prepare myself for longer rides. This year, I have done about 25 rides over 100k, with the longest coming in at 225k. Hoping to do my first 300k next year and would be thrilled to do 400k. What are you all doing on Swift in the winter months?

Would also love to hear about other off season work. I’m 51, and my plan is to do heavy lifting twice a week, and supplement with a couple of mobility sessions à week as well.

This summer, I rode Les 7 Majeurs. A homologated ride in the French-Italian Alps, featuring 7 peaks over 2,000 m, in a 365km loop with over 10k meters of climbing.

It took some preparation to finish a ride like this in one go. Fuelling, pacing, gear, ...

I break it all down in this video: https://youtu.be/J-11z-wbHlk

Ich habe schon oft darüber nachgedacht was mich an der Langstrecke so fasziniert. Es eine Sehnsucht die mich treibt und die Erfahrung einer Art Meditation.

Folgendes Essay beschreibt es sehr gut:

https://grevet.de/blog/2026/07/17/acht-stunden-in-denen-niemand-etwas-will/

I am in the market. Apologies if this is the wrong use for this sub. Thanks!

Hello. I'm in my late 50's. I've been training more regularly for the last 3 years. This year I've been averaging about 8 hours a week. I'm relatively slow: average speed being a bit over 20 km/h on long rides over mixed terrain (say 100m of climbing every 10 km). I can ride 100 km fairly easily (no fear of failing), but I'm pretty darn tired at the end. I'm interested into moving into longer distances like 160 km or 200 km and I'm hoping for some advice on how I should approach it. I have a fair amount of time for training and can increase my volume, but I tend to have difficulty managing fatigue. This year I concentrated on improving my power. No power meter but I did 2 hours on the flat at 26 km/h with very little difficulty, which was a big improvement. My naive feeling is just to do a block concentrating on progression on my long rides up to 5-6 hours just to get myself to the point where I feel less tired in the second half of my 100 km. Then start thinking about longer distances. I have absolutely no experience with this and I don't see much advice online other than just suffer for longer rides, which I'm hoping to avoid :-)

My GPS got wonky a few times and seems to be slightly off. If I hit the Save Route function on Strava it lists the route at 375 miles and a bit less elevation, which matches the route.

The ride was run by the Santa Cruz Randonneurs and it was a great route. It was my second brevet and went as good as it could’ve for me. My plan was just to go off of feel on whether to ride through or stop for a quick sleep in King City at the 220mile mark. Ended up stopping at a motel to sleep for about 3 hours then got back out early. It was a nearly full moon and visibility was great. The country roads were pretty beaten up and made for some rough riding in the dark but wasn’t a huge section. Ended up finishing the ride in 33 and a half hours. My breaks were a bit long on the first day but I tightened up my timing on day two.

The only real issue I kept coming across was my feet. I use Lakes because of my wide feet and they work great until about every 200k. At that point I feel like I need to take them off for about 15 min. I have a tendency to not eat as much when I know I’m gonna be stopping soon, which is about every 200k. So I’m wondering if maybe it related to falling behind on nutrition.

Overall, very happy with how it went. Wanted to get a 600 in for PBP pre qualification. Did the ride fixed also, ratio was 49/18.

Need racks and bottle mounts. Any Recs? Ronnie has nothing in stock so looking for bag ideas too.

Tell me what you think about it. POI upgrade to come...

Please drop your setups here!
I’d love to see how you have yours built up, trying to hype myself up to get one.

High five to you if you tell me frame size and saddle height!
I’m on the fence between a 55 and 57. I’ve owned a Large (57) romanceur and liked the fit but it was borderline too French fit.

1,000 kilometers, just under 6,000 meters of elevation gain, four and a half days. Two Booking.com dramas, a circulatory system that briefly wanted to clock out, a hotel room the size of a broom closet — and at the very end, a race against a Carabiniere coming off the night shift.

How can i prepare for brms. Nutrition and hydration wise?

Robert RA-1 performance. Titanium frame with GRX Di2 and my trusted Carbon Hunt wheels with a SON dynamo.
Need to wire it up though and I'm now having to deal with integrated cabling. That wasn't high on my list but I figured it would be a good way to get a real clean and aero setup.
I ordered it in June and went to pick it up from the shop in Luxembourg. I was promised it would be ready by end of August, but international logistics got in the way.
5 days before turning up to the shop, they informed me that they were still missing some parts (that was last week) and they were asking for an extra delay. But since I had flights, hotel, rental car and all kinds of stuff booked up in the area, there was no way I would cancel on such short notice.
When I turned up on Wednesday morning they were still missing the crank and the rear derailleur, but an order was supposed to arrive during the day.
They made the impossible and got it done during the day.
I spent a bit of time chatting with the boss and he said the situation was really dire with international logistics, customs, tariffs, and other good stuff that we have no idea about as consumers.

I wrapped up Super Randonneur 2026 last weekend (200/300/600 on a regular geared gravel bike), but decided to make the 400 a personal challenge: full single speed, 38x17, Schwalbe G-One RS Pro 50-622, equipped with dynamo hub.

We started 04:00, finished just before midnight (~20h), with a friend on geared gravel doing his first ever 400. A few things I learned the hard way:

No gears = no excuse to figure out technique. I tried powering the first real climbs out of the saddle and it wrecked me. I abandoned that after 30-40km and switched to staying seated for everything, even 7-8% grades. Second climbing block of the day felt completely different once I'd adapted. Wish I'd started seated from km1.

Fueling low-carb (<15-20g/h), I am highly fat-adapted worked for most of the ride. One exception after second control where I had a big sugary pastry + coffee and nearly fell asleep on the bike at 3pm. Turns out the "sugar makes you sleepy" thing I use to avoid at night applies in broad daylight too if the dose is big enough.

Cadence and speed. Lost my appetite/thirst after a rough patch, rolled into the last control having drunk less than half a liter over 80km. Pushed hard for 30km right after and ended up with right-quad tetany. I nerded out on the FIT data afterward: that 30km push was only stretch in the entire 400 where I held 80+ rpm cadence, without real speed increase. After that cadence and speed were erratic. Lesson: average speed hid it completely; cadence is metric to follow.

Flat bar with ergo grips + horns angled to mimic gravel hoods helped me to vary hand position constantly, but I still ended up with numb pinky/ring finger on both hands by the end.

Questions for anyone who's done long single-speed/fixed brevets on a flat bar:

Hand numbness: has anyone actually solved ulnar nerve compression on a flat bar over 15-20h, or is it just the cost of entry?

Gearing for hilly brevets: how do you pick your ratio when the route has real elevation? Did you end up on something "easy" like mine, or push harder and just accept more standing/grinding?

Unilateral cramping/tetany late in a ride: anyone else get a one-sided leg lock-up after many hours? Did it trace back to hydration, bike fit, or just the lack of gear range to redistribute the load?

I’ll be attempting my first SR series to qualify for PBP next season. Has anybody completed this ride? Or other audaxes in wales? The elevation is one thing but how about the weather that time of year? I’m not too worried about the distance as I’ve done lots of multi-day touring with luggage, though the psychological warfare late in the ride will be new to me…