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If you’ve been riding your bike in your local area for any length of time, you probably feel as though you know the roads pretty well. You might even feel as though there’s barely a piece of tarmac or a stretch of trail for quite some way that you haven’t explored at least once.
When we get used to bashing out the same old rides again and again, it can get like that. However, there’s one way to find out exactly how much you really do have left to explore, and that is to take up tiling.
Before you rush out to B&Q (other hardware stores are available) to buy yourself a new grouting trowel, we’re not talking about bathroom DIY here. Tiling, in cycling terms at least, is the practice of ticking off the geographical map tiles that originated on Open Street Map and can now be found on a variety of sites and platforms with dedicated tile features and functions.
Each tile is around a mile square, making them a handy size to amass and accrue as you go about your riding.
If it all sounds rather quaint, perhaps it is. But that’s not to say it isn’t also serious stuff. Matthew Winn Smith proved as much with the new British record he recently set of recording a 15×15 square of tiles in a single ride.
If a square measuring around 15 miles (25km) by 15 miles doesn’t sound like a huge area to cover on a bike, consider that it amounts to 225 squares, and Winn Smith had to visit every one of them in a single, unbroken ride. No support either.
With careful planning that included a certain amount of piggy-backing off the route of the previous record of 13×13, the Surrey-based barrister completed a route around Kent that amounted to 207.9 miles (334.5km) in around 13-and-a-half hours.
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He had to deal with rain, and a puncture, in the early stages of the ride, but 45-year-old Winn Smith comes from a background of ultra-racing – he was the 2014 double-Ironman world champion and earlier this year rode Land’s End to John o’ Groats in less than four days.
Unsurprisingly, there was no way he wasn’t going to complete the tiling record ride, he insists.
“I would have carried on going until it got done,” he says. “And it was a long ride. But it was locked in – I was going to break myself if I had to, to get it done.”
He had no support on the ride – the rules don’t stipulate this but Winn Smith took his cue from the record-setters who had gone before him and completed his ride completely alone.
“It seems to be a badge of honour that people do these with no support, so no one in a car handing up any kind of food or drink or providing support,” he says.
“I don’t think it’s essential, but it definitely seems to be something that some of the longer riders have done. I thought it was probably nice to stick with those kinds of rules.”
Riding his Fairlight Strael, with only himself for company, Winn Smith ploughed a lonely but relentless furrow north and south across the southern-English county, stopping only twice beyond his early puncture fix, once in a McDonalds (“to my shame”) and once in a cafe in Tenterden. Otherwise it was on-the-go bananas, flapjacks, gels and bars.
Going global
If Winn Smith’s ride is impressive enough, the global tiling records are on another level altogether, with current world record holder Peter Lundgren of Sweden having posted a mammoth 25×25 ride of 512 miles (825 kilometres) last year. Undertaken in his home nation, the ride took him more than 38 hours, and was 50% gravel – though flat terrain meant that he covered a relatively scant 3,000m of climbing.
One of the few rules of tiling records mean they must be done in a single ride – no sleeping allowed, and at this level, it becomes a battle of wills to stay awake, as well as a physical challenge.
That’s not to say Winn Smith is entirely deterred though.
“To beat Peter Lundgren’s record probably requires a ride of around 900km, you can’t do it slowly at that kind of distance, otherwise you’d end up sleeping,” he points out. “It is an epic undertaking. It probably, requires having to cycle through two nights with no sleep, but maybe in the next year or two, I’ll have a go at that.”
Thankfully, you don’t have to be an ultra-distance headbanger to enjoy the many and varied joys of ’tile-bagging’. The ‘collect them all’ element has plenty of appeal to those looking to explore new roads and trails, or simply looking for a new dynamic to their riding – and it also features the numbers, maps and charts beloved of so many riders.
Start out by connecting your Strava account to a website such as VeloViewer (which many Cycling Weekly readers will already know well), Ride Every Tile, or Squadrats, and in return you’ll be presented with a map of all the tiles you have ridden in worldwide. You can get to work on bagging more (some are likely to be just around the corner) or enlarging your ‘Max Square’ (the biggest square clump of tiles on your map that are bordered by other tiles on all sides).
As Winn Smith says, “Anyone who’s a list-ticker, who then can combine it with this physical thing, makes a really powerfully addictive pastime. For others, it’s going to be completely and utterly pointless and ridiculous, but that’s how we’re wired. People are on that spectrum in very different ways, and I’m probably at very far end of the spectrum.”
Sounds like that may – or may not – be your winter sorted, then!
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