Non-Club Run, 28th September, 2019
| Total Distance: | 60 km/37 miles with 1,254 m of climbing |
| Riding Time: | 2 hours 45 minutes |
| Average Speed: | 21.8km/h |
| Group Size: | Me |
| Temperature: | 15℃ |
| Weather in a word or two: | Dank |
Also featuring bong-eyed cows…
The alarm on Saturday morning woke me to find a sustained rainstorm lashing the house and sheeting the roads with run off water. It was horrendous and I went back to bed.
When I woke again, the rain had largely petered out, but it was quarter to nine and I had half an hour to get up, get dressed and get across to the meeting place in time to join the club run. It wasn’t going to happen.
Instead I decided to stay south of the river for a solo ride, meandering aimlessly through the hills closer to home and tackling climbs I haven’t attempted since I was a junior. Despite the years and increasingly erratic and extreme weather conditions, I can report that I didn’t find any instances where erosion had noticeably lessened the steepness, severity or height of any of these hills.
If you squint hard enough, my ride profile could perhaps be seen as resembling an overused, worn out, old saw blade, but there was no discernible pattern to the route I inscribed across the map – a giant, formless, free-form squiggle that even Jackson Pollack would disown.
Still, I enjoyed my ride and managed to pack over a thousand metres of climbing into my sixty kilometres.
Hopefully, normal service will be resumed next week.
Oh … the cows. Daughter#2 needed some original photos of farm animals for one of her school projects, so when a herd of cows in a field adjacent to the road started keeping pace with me up one of the climbs, I backtracked down the hill and stopped to snap some pics of my bovine pacers on my phone. The photos were begrudgingly accepted, but only after I was accused of deliberately seeking out the North East’s ugliest, bong-eyed cows. That’s gratitude for you.
YTD Totals: 5,978 km / 3,715 miles with 78,970 metres of climbing
Sur La Jante 