How to ride the End to End (Lands End to John-O-Groats)

First a quick note for the uninitiated, a classic 'big ride' for British touring cyclists is to ride the End to End route from bottom left to top right, about 1000 miles depending on the exact roads chosen. Amazingly the cycling record is just 44 hours and 4 min. Anyway, here's my advice for anyone wanting to attempt the route in a sensible amount of time (14 to 20 days seems to be typical).

1) Get some maps
2) Get quite fit, as doing 60 miles (100km) each and every day is a fairly big ask on the body, even for regular cyclists.
3) Don't plan to ride 90 miles in one day including a traverse of a large city like Glasgow (just for example).

Today we repeatedly met 3 chaps who were attempting the end to end for the first time. When I say we met them repeatedly, we kept passing them and then they would catch us up when we stopped for lunch, sunscreen, a few-mile diversion into town etc... Now Alex and I don't exactly fly along, I think we managed an average of around 9 miles per hour today, so it's safe to assume these chaps were averaging about the same. But I don't think that's really where they were going wrong; let's see if we can figure it out with a quick check against the list of advice above.

1) Get some maps ? Well, no - despite planning to cycle from one end to the other of one of the most densely road-covered countries on the planet, these gents and decided not to bring a map of any kind; I can only assume they were looking for a bit of adventure and thought that they could just wing it.

2) Get quite fit ? Well ... no - They were a combination of young and fat, or old and slightly less fat. As I said, when actually turning the pedals Al and I consistently sailed past these chaps with our 5 months' worth of luggage and without being in a particular hurry to be anywhere holding us back.

3) Don't plan to ride 90 miles in one day ... See now this is where I really think these fellows came unstuck today, when we first passed them at about 9:30am they had just set off for the day and we leap frogged each other to Glasgow where we left them behind as we diverted into Glasgow central for lunch. Just out of our destination town of Paisley we met them again at 3:15pm - where they hailed us down and asked for directions (no map you see... the town they were trying to get to was on the border of England and Scotland, some 65 miles away (plus another 5 miles back to Glasgow to get on the right road).

We have no idea how this story ends, but these lads have a long way to go to Lands End at their current rate of progress !