London Edinburgh London (LEL) 2025 proved to be an unforgettable event, though perhaps not for the reasons anyone anticipated. My own journey ended prematurely on the first day, and the entire event was later called off due to severe winds sweeping across northern England and Scotland.

If you want to skip directly to the lessons learned, feel free to do so at the bottom.

For those unfamiliar, LEL is a prestigious 1500km audax challenge, a true test of endurance that takes riders from Writtle, Essex, all the way to Innerleithen near Edinburgh, Scotland, and back again. This year, around 2,500 cyclists from around the world gathered to tackle this epic adventure.

This is a report of my successful Celtic Knot brevet.

I was a bit nervous going into it for various reasons:

• My last big brevet was PBP in 2023.
• In 2024, I didn’t do any 200+ distance audax events, just a 200 each month to work on my RRTY. I think it’s normal for people to take it a bit easier after a PBP season.
• I got injured in February while riding the East Wicklow 200, with IT band issues. This probably deserves its own post, but I spent March recovering, doing gym sessions, and lost my RRTY.
• I was bringing the new Mason Aspect Integrale, and I only had a 200 on it. However, a professional bike fit was done, so I felt it was okay to bring it with me. Famous last words, right?

Anyway, my knee was feeling well, and on Friday the 30th of May, I drove to the start.

After 14 years, 10 at Facebook and another 4 at Meta, I am no longer a Facebook/Meta employee and it’s time to move on. And it’s not related to performance or layoffs.

You know those typical LinkedIn posts about “amazing journeys” with “rocket ships” and all that? Yeah, I’m not going there! There have definitely been ups and downs along the way, but that’s normal.

For the last 25 years, I’ve pretty much gone straight from one job to another. The one real break I took was an incredible four-week honeymoon in Australia before starting at Facebook—totally worth delaying my start date!

I have decided to retire my old wordpress blog and set up a statically generated site using hugo.

Hugo is pretty nice :) It is super fast, I don’t have to setup a LAMP stack with webserver, mysql database and PHP. It is much more secure and I don’t have to worry about hosting things on my DigitalOcean VPS and worry about hacking attack etc. In fact, I have even destroyed my VPS and save some money.