We have put together a selection of fantastic rides with options for all levels, including the famous 70 mile Cycle the Wight and the ultra-tough Hills Killer Mountain Bike challenge to family rides and forest trails.

Unfortunately, I'll be away on holiday during the festival and that's a pity because I quite fancy having a go at the 26 mile Hills Killer Mountain Bike Challenge.

To celebrate the start of summer, The Times is giving away a collection of guides to the great outdoors, showing you how to make the most of the British countryside. Your next instalment, inside The Times this Saturday, June 13, is a superb guide to cycling, filled with ideas, advice and wry observations from Times journalists.

I'm always suspicious when newspapers use the word "superb" about their own writing, but you never know. We normally buy The Times on Saturday anyway so I'll be giving this guide a glance.

• Bike Hike is a mashup of Google's maps and those of the Ordnance Survey; very neat (hat-tip to Stu for the link),
• Sustrans has a searchable map showing current and planned cycle routes; it's not as slick as Bike Hike, but it's still fairly useful.
• BikeRadar.com is a good source for all sorts of bike-related info, and they have a particularly good selection of user-uploaded routes.

1. Cotton t-shirts just don't cut it on a hot day; we're going to upgrade to high-tech fast-wicking shirts, something like this, and
2. The iPhone is invaluable and without it we'd have been stuffed; might be a good idea to get an external battery.

I went for a short ride (7.48 miles) last week, starting at the Sir Joseph Paxton (a pub, not the real Sir Joseph Paxton , because he's dead) in Titchfield Common (just round the corner from my house). Following a corrected version of last week's problematic ride (Titchfield Haven Ride), my objective was to get the whole thing done as quickly as possible, preferably inside 60 minutes. As it happened, I managed to do the whole thing in 48:26 which, although not necessarily very fast, rather suggests that 60 minutes was far too generous a target. I think I'll have another go next weekend and aim for 42 minutes, which ought to be a bit more of a challenge.

How do I know it took 48 minutes? I have been using MotionX-GPS Lite on my iPhone to track my route and speed. It's a pretty good application and definitely worth a look if you hike or ride and want to know exactly how far, and how fast, you've gone, although it puts rather a strain on the battery (3-4 hours is probably the limit).

Once you have your route nicely logged to your phone, there's a small amount of work to do publish it. It isn't difficult, but I plan to post some helpful hints when I've had time to draft them. The weekend, maybe?