I received the latest edition of
Arrivée this week, and I was struck by an anecdotal remark recounted in Nick Tickner's article about his experience of LEL 2022:
"anyone who needs to sleep at Louth probably isn't going to make it".
Is this true? What does the data show? For the following charts, I looked for the first control where each rider stopped for at least 3 hours, and assumed this location was their first sleep stop.
It looks like quite a number of riders who stopped at Louth actually went on to finish successfully in time, but the success rate clearly improves for riders who made it further north on the first day.
Distance travelled is only part of the story, and the second chart presents the same data in terms of how long the first day was for riders in the two groups. The distributions are very similar, showing that both groups of riders actually put in similar shifts on the first day.
More info and more charts here :
LEL in charts