touch wrote:I've just imported all my strava rides to get involved with this.
My score is 7x7 at the moment but I think I can get up 10x10 with a carefully planned ride tonight.

Filling in the first few blanks should be quite easy but it's going to become difficult quite soon. Living on the coast means that I'm limited in which directions I can expand my square.

Water based activities count!

I'm going to hire me a boat.

Got to 31x31 yesterday. Getting to 23 was OK but hard work improving above that. Was riding nearly 7 hours yesterday.

I'm the same, can only head northwest to extend mine without cycling across the forth!

My expansion westward encounters the wild north end of the Monadhliath.

Even Geograph comes up a blank over there



(we all know about Geograph, yeah?)

I like the challenge that my square consists of routes ridden from home to grab squares, means planning longer and longer rides.
Lost interest in looking at other riders squares when they just drive out to a spot and then ride the bike for a few miles to grab tiles.

I think that's fine until you get to upwards of 30 squares from home base. I just simply don't have time for rides that long on a regular basis.

Blackhound wrote:Got to 31x31 yesterday. Getting to 23 was OK but hard work improving above that. Was riding nearly 7 hours yesterday.

Very impressive Kevin. I need to put in a small bit of effort to get to 15, but getting above that is going to take quite a lot of effort

All my rides have been from home or have been part of an extended commute. Going to need to change that to pick up a few more technically

Strangely, I live in the North East quarter of my max square. Most of my rides are commute based and I work South East of me. So technically I should be in a good position to increase it, but trying to find the time is the problem, plus pick up those random tiles in the far flung corners

ScotRoutes wrote:My expansion westward encounters the wild north end of the Monadhliath.

Even Geograph comes up a blank over there

Yeah, me too. I'm in Inverness - expanding North is blocked by the Moray Firth and South is going to be difficult when I encounter the Monadhliaths. I think my best bet is to try and centre the square East and try to collect tiles between Inverness, Forres, Aberlour and Aviemore.

I've six overlapping max squares of 12x12! I live about three squares outside these. Three single squares and a block of five will get me to 16x16. Frustratingly if Strava had been around fifteen years ago I'd have logged pretty much all the Lakes and most of the gaps in the Dales from my fell running.

Logging previous rides / runs / walks is perfectly feasible. Even the date of them isn't that important if you're only doing it to see the impact on your Explorer square. I'll be adding a few Munro bagging expeditions when I get to those bits. I'll set the date to 2000 or something so that I don't confuse other analyses.

Are you proposing to manually add the walk or do you have saved GPS tracks from those trips?

Both!

I am with Numplumz on the car to get a new square. I do use a train on occasion to get out or back and although the car is tempting so far I have resisted.

If I really focused my riding I could do more but I am still just riding as I choose picking up a few squares as I go.

Another personal rule is that I will not just go up a road a bit and turn around so I get my square. If it is a through route I go through. Done a few dead ends as required.

I got to 3x 9x9 squares last night, time to start heading further west. I've managed to get most of my squares so far on my commutes but as I work right on the east coast it's getting harder and harder to grab squares on the way home. Misses is working Monday so hopefully I can push it out to 10 or 11, either that or I'm getting the train somewhere and riding home for a wee change of scenery

Starting to make some progress in Bearbones land... long way to go yet though (I should have started doing the BB200s earlier!).

Extended my commute home last night to pick up a couple of VV tiles, gone from 13 to 14 max square now. Annoyingly my strava route accidently paused when my phone died, turned it back on but strava hadn't started when I thought it had. Luckily it had captured the two tiles, just missed the last third of the ride

I now have two 14x14 squares, there are about four groups of 2-4 tiles that are stopping me from getting much above this. They're all achieveable, but all in slightly different places that'll make detouring there not straightforward. Plus it means riding there on the road which is less fun that off road

There's an event I have in July that will go right through the middle of all my squares and should give me a pretty damn big grid. I've specifically left it like that because I figure it's cool to link the two.

Not really been doing much exploring of late though. Crappy weather and too many events.

This is what my max square looks like at the moment

Nice.

Just been looking at the leaderboard. Check out this bloke, bonkers!

https://veloviewer.com/athlete/1195187/ ... =0,0,5,6,9

This bloke is in the UK, he's ridden in my neck of the woods to pick up squares. Having looked at his routes they're cunningly devised to pick up as many squares as possible in the quickest way

https://veloviewer.com/athlete/801323/a ... =0,0,5,6,9

Yes, but some of it comes from style of how you go about it rather than the result.

Kev's already mentioned it earlier, about riding from home and wherever possible riding as a loop, as aposed to driving out to a location and having a ride planned just to pick up squares.

Doing an entire country is pretty cool, though I'd be more impressed if it wasn't virtually all road riding.

There's a bit of negativity floating around on this thread.

Somebody has devised a new game and there's a set of rules. Why bash people for playing the game without breaking those rules?

Road riding, offroading riding, what's the difference?

Driving to the start of a ride, why a problem? I've never ridden to the start of a BearBones 200, so do my Welsh explorer tiles not count?

I've got a couple of water-only tiles. Do they not count because I couldn't ride a bike, or not swim / row / kayak from home?

It motivates people to do more activities. All good fullstop.

+1

There are lots of variations on how folk are using this. Personally, I think folk living in large conurbations should be banned as it's too easy...