I've left Pete's 30min stop at each contgrol in the spreadsheet so I guess that might throw the times a bit. Hear what your saying on the tight planning, but I do want some sort of rough plan to work to so I know I'm not going to miss control closing times!
30 mins per control really isn't much at all, it might be easy for the first few controls but you'd be doing well to keep that up over the whole ride.
I finished LEL'09 in 115h. My moving average was almost bang on 20kph so that's 70 hours of actual cycling. I had 10 hours of sleep, so that leaves 35 hours stopped at controls.
Here's how much time I had in hand during LEL 2009:-
Note that the odd bit at 1100km is where the GPS ran out of batteries about 20km from Thorne and I didn't bother stopping to fix it. The next time the GPS was turned on (with fresh batteries) I'd been stopped for 3 hours and was just leaving the control.
The first day was tailwind assisted, that was a 6 hour stop at Thorne (320km on the way out) with big rest, shower, 3 hours of sleep (should have faffed less and either slept more or just gone back out again). 2nd night's stop at Eskdalemuir with 2 hours sleep. Small stop at Traquair, bigger stop at Dalkeith (720km) for lots of food, shower, etc, another short stop at Traquair on return and then ~3 hours at Eskdalemuir again (no sleep) before we realised the weather wasn't going to get better. Sufferered with sleep dep on the stage to next stage which included a short (50min) sleep in a church porch in Brampton (~850km). Crawled on to Alston where I got food and then 3 hours of sleep in a proper bed at the control, but that stop took 5 hours in total.
From there it was a case of bimbling along and stopping as long as we were in the time limit. The drop down Yad Moss bought us enough time to have a pub lunch in Middleton-In-Teesdale (920km), then the controls at Middleton-Tyas (960km), Coxwold (1020km), puncture stop not long after that, and then Thorne. Think I had another 3 hour stop there after a shower.
Final day was a relatively fast blat along the flat-lands using up spare time at controls to relax and chat with others, impromtu roadside picnic somewhere near Kimbolton if I remember correctly.
I wouldn't have normally sailed so close to the wind (as far as time limits go) but the bad weather up in Scotland had meant a 2 hour extension being granted (which I had no intention of using) and so that became the new contingency buffer. In the end I finished with 1h40m to spare after a very relaxing final section from Gamlingay with an increasingly large bunch of riders from all over the world.
The graph above kind of makes sense to me given the conditions (tailwind on day 1 and bits of day 2, torrential rain day 3, tiredness creeping in, second wind when back in the flatlands and the finish line in sight) but I would have had no chance predicting that in advance!
