The Tour is on. Time to plan a ride of your own.

Every July it goes the same way. The Tour de France is on, and for the first few stages I watch it like a normal person. Somewhere around stage six, something shifts. I stop thinking these people are not human and start thinking I should do a long ride this weekend.

If that's you right now: good. That feeling has a shelf life of about three days, and the difference between a great Sunday ride and another Sunday of "maybe next week" is usually whether you planned the route while you were still motivated. So plan it now. It takes ten minutes.

You don't need a mountain

The pros get the Alps. You probably get farmland, a canal, and a headwind. That's fine. A good ride isn't about elevation. It's about a route that feels like a journey instead of an errand. A few things I've learned the hard way:

Ride a loop, not an out-and-back. Riding the same road twice in one day is demoralising in a way that's hard to explain to non-cyclists. A loop always feels shorter than the same distance ridden there-and-back.

Start into the wind. Check the forecast, and point the first half of your loop at the wind. A tailwind home is the closest thing amateur cycling has to a domestique.

Put something at the halfway point. A bakery, a café, a village square, anything. Rides with a destination in the middle get finished. Rides that are just a line on a map get abandoned at the first drizzle.

Plan it on an actual map

I plan routes by clicking waypoints on a map and letting a routing engine snap everything to roads that are actually suitable for bikes. We built a free cycling route planner for exactly this. You click your way around a loop, and it follows cycle paths and quiet roads, shows live distance and estimated ride time, and draws an elevation profile so those "flat" polder roads can't surprise you. No account, nothing to install.

Whatever tool you use, the process is the same: drop a start point (ideally your front door), sketch the loop in the direction of the wind, and keep an eye on the distance as you go. It's much easier to trim a route on a screen than on the road with 40 km still to ride and empty bottles.

Get it on your bike computer

Export the route as a GPX file, the universal format every bike computer and app understands. Then:

Garmin: plug it in and drop the file into the NewFiles folder, or import it via Garmin Connect and sync. Wahoo: import the GPX in the companion app and it appears on the head unit. Phone: apps like Komoot, RideWithGPS, and OsmAnd all open GPX files directly.

A word about distance

A Tour stage is 180 kilometres. Yours doesn't have to be. The inspiration is transferable; the distance is not. If your usual ride is 40 km, plan 60 and feel like a hero. Don't plan 120 and get rescued by someone with a car and an opinion. You can always ride the loop twice next month.

The Tour runs for three weeks. Your motivation, if you're anything like me, runs for about four days. Use them.