Two Up, Two Down

Club Run, Saturday 26^th March, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 114 km/71 miles with 1,060 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 35 minutes

Average Speed: 24.8 km/h

Group size: 29 riders, 1 FNG

Temperature: 13°C

Weather in a word or two: Chilly and overcast

Main topic of conversation at the start:

According to his Faecesbook post, OGL undertook an epic ride of over 85 miles on Good Friday, two thirds of which he claims to have completed all on his lonesome. The BFG won the impromptu sweepstake by correctly anticipating OGL would mention his own “epicness” within the first 2 minutes of arriving at the meeting point. We were not disappointed.

Then, unwittingly and unlooked for and with no prompting at all from his audience, OGL once again launched into the gruesome tale of scrotum-meets-stem-during-track-meet, replete with an all too vivid description of the catastrophic ripping and rupturing that ensued and the stitching needed to make him whole again.

Attire, a fully-paid up member of the Cult of the Racing Snakes listened to this bloody tale impassively, then reached into his jersey pocket, wrestled out an entire Lyle’s Family Sized Golden Syrup Cake Bar (typical number of servings per pack = 9) and proceeded to devour it almost whole, gnawing through and around the different layers of packaging to get to the sticky goodness within.

0__70799_zoom — Not the most portable of snacks, but the equivalent of a dozen energy gels

Seeing such a massive cake bar being cavalierly brandished and then demolished, the Red Max felt it put Taffy Steve’s choice of puny cereal bars to mortal shame and he pressed Taffy Steve to reveal just how inadequate and insecure this made him feel.

The BFG had a cunning plan to not only ride every one of the four club runs over the Easter weekend, but complete each one on a different bike. With this in mind he rolled up astride the carbon on carbon uber-bike and immediately began praying to the weather gods for a dry day on Sunday so he could venture out on his wooden wheels.

The Prof informed us he’d manage to wrestle Mrs. Prof’s gear hanger back into some semblance of functionality and she’d been able to limp noisily home from her mechanical yesterday, albeit with the rear derailleur threatening to hurl itself bodily into the back wheel and playing a clattering tune on the spokes, as carefree as a schoolboy running a stick along park railings.

The Monkey Butler Boy complained about the pink stem cap that had appeared overnight on his bike following the Red Max’s latest round of refits and improvements. Max suggested it was there to remind the Monkey Butler Boy of how girly he is every time he looks down and said that he’d even considered having “You’re a big girl” engraved across the top.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

The Lance Armstrong film, The Program came under critical review and received the massive ringing endorsement, “Yeah … it’s all right”

I criticised Ben Foster for having to take drugs in order to be able to act like someone who took drugs, reminding Taffy Steve of Laurence Olivier’s fabulous response on seeing Dustin Hoffman’s “method” acting technique of not sleeping and making a mess of himself to get into character while shooting Marathon Man: “Dear boy, it’s called acting.”

[The venerable Toshi-san remembers Olivier’s retort as “Try acting, dear boy. It’s easier.” Which may be inaccurate, but is even better.]

Spry felt the actor who played Michele Ferrari really let the film down with an awful and unbelievable cod-European accent, only to discover the actor, Guillaume Canet was actually French, so plausible Italian shouldn’t have been that much of a stretch.

Someone wondered why Jan Ullrich didn’t feature and I think we all had in mind candidates to play the hapless, rotund German who never seemed to get to grips with the temptations of the off-season.

The Waffle:

So, here we go then, day two of the Easter holidays and the second day in a row that I’m allowed out for a club run. I guess I was just born lucky. Or maybe the family are happier in my absence and I’m just unwanted in my own home.

The perfect, blue skies of Friday had gone however, leaving a grey, windy and even chillier clump of weather to be negotiated, with a burst of heavy rain being forecast to make an unwelcome appearance around midday.

The camera slung under the saddle appears to be producing one or two decent shots in amongst a mountain of dross and discards, so would be put into action again. One or two of the riders captured have even adopted the photos for their personal Faecesbook profiles, maybe there’s no higher compliment.

This got me wondering if I might get embroiled in an argument over royalties and image rights like David Slater and his monkey selfie. All it really needs is for someone to champion and care for the rights of cyclists the same way they do for hugely vicious, vermin-raddled, wild monkeys – c’mon, surely MAMILS are more lovable and worthy than crested macaque’s? Anyone? No? Oh, well…

Arriving at the meeting place there were a handful of survivors from Friday and a whole new batch of fresh riders eager to stretch their legs and dish out a little pain. Once again then a fairly sizeable group of just under 30 of us pushed off, clipped in and set out.

Things were going well until we stopped at a T-junction and I watched in disbelief as the BFG fell like some majestic giant redwood, slowly and silently toppling to crash into the ground while still clipped firmly into his uber-bike. I’m still not sure whether he was attempting a smart-arse track stand, was having cleat problems or simply forgot what he was doing – either way the results were unintentionally comic.

He shamefacedly picked himself up, scrubbed ruefully at the scratches on his no-longer pristine brake hoods and tried to nonchalantly side foot the debris back into the crater his impact had created in the road surface. Maybe now people won’t be so intent on pulling stupid-ass stunts – wheelies, track stands and other shit while riding in a group.

We recovered and pushed on, Crazy Legs and Goose hitting the front for an epic and marathon effort into a strengthening and debilitating headwind. Chapeau guys.

At the split Crazy Legs went off to recuperate a little with the amblers, but Goose stuck with the longer, harder, faster group of around a dozen or so, finding the going quite hard after all his sterling work on the front.

I felt good and led on the first couple of hills, but the legs tired quickly and began to feel heavy and full of hurt. Although we took a completely different route getting there, we were soon once again heading for the Quarry climb and then the slow burn to the café.

I managed to stay with the lead riders to the top of the Quarry, but was distanced for a while shortly afterwards trying to recover. We then all regrouped on a downhill section and the pace began to build.

Pierre Rolland look-alike Spry put in a perfectly timed attack on the next short rise and splintered the group. The rider whose wheel I was on lost contact and by the time I’d gone around him the gap was too great to shut down.

I was on the drops and working harder than I had on my solo break the day before, but the gap at refused to close and then ever so slowly yawned open. I pushed on regardless, bouncing and rattling over the uneven road surface and limped into the café some way behind the leaders and appropriately sur la jante.

Inside we found Plumose Pappus home from university for the holidays and intent on turning all the paper napkins in the café a bright shade of red. He was managing all of this from a deep gash in his elbow where a large crescent of flesh seemed to have been crudely hacked out and according to the BFG he looked even paler than I did after the hill climb.

From what I can gather from the muddled conversation around me, Plumose had fallen whilst trying to take a jacket off mid-ride. If true, maybe now people won’t be so intent on pulling stupid-ass stunts – wheelies, track stands – oh, sorry – you’ve heard that already…

The Red Max once described Plumose Pappus as the only man with legs the same diameter as his seatpost and Taffy Steve had calculated he was exactly twice the young feller’s weight. The worry now is that with a sizeable chunk out of his arm he’s going to weigh even less and be even more difficult to hold back on the climbs. It’s a radical form of weight loss and perhaps one that should be kept from Sir David Brailsford and his dogged and unwavering pursuit of marginal gains.

Plumose Pappus was bundled into his mum’s ambulance/voiture balai, no doubt destined for the local A&E and an intense bout of wound cleaning and stitching up. When he recovers he’ll have a great opportunity to swap hoary old injury stories with OGL and perhaps one day, if he’s brave enough, they can even compare scars.

Meanwhile, back in the café I was successfully inviting my fellow cyclists to sit like a human shield between me and the fire which was roaring and throwing out heat with the intensity of a Krupp blast furnace.

Ever the pragmatist, Taffy Steve took the much more effective step of simply negotiated with the café matron to have the fire turned down, or for them to at least not bother throwing another sacrificial cyclist onto the blaze. Mission accomplished the stop at least became bearable.

On the return home we hit roadworks and were stopped at some traffic lights. OGL spotted a car pulling into and lurking in parking space on the wrong side of the road and rightly guessed he was going to jump around us when the lights changed.

Suitably warned we were able to avoid getting unnecessarily caught up under his wheels and impeding his entitled progress. The danger wasn’t over though, as a truly moronic RIM in a white Transit van tried to shoot the gap between the lights and cyclists forcing us to dive out of the way again. We watched in complete and utter astonishment as he then drove 20 yards past the lights and turned off the road and onto a driveway. What a complete and utter arse hat.

The legs were heavy and hurting, but I managed to hang in the group until the first split when the remnants entered the Mad Mile and started to accelerate away for one last blast. I let them go happy with my own pace and preparing myself to turn off and into the headwind for the trek home.

Things weren’t too bad until I started to drop down to the river, finding the wind was so strong I had to pedal downhill to maintain momentum. As I crossed over the bridge the first drops of a light rain began to sift down, but I was on the climb of the Heinous Hill before it began to fall with any real intent and safely indoors before the heavens truly opened.

Two hard rides in two days, both enjoyable, but I really do need to rest and recover now. I’ve also discovered that doing two club runs in succession is a challenge, but not nearly as difficult as two blog entries.

I’m quite looking forward to the resumption of normal service next week.

YTD Totals: 1,720 km /1,069 miles with 16,238 metres of climbing

Mea Culpa

Club Run, Good Friday 25^th March, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 104 km/65 miles with 863 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 7 minutes

Average Speed: 25.3 km/h

Group size: 26 riders

Temperature: 15°C

Weather in a word or two: Bright ‘n’ breezy

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Mea Culpa#1 the BFG corrected last week’s story regarding his wheels on fire, they weren’t the carbon on carbon model from his new uber-bike that he tried to spontaneously combust, but in fact the fabled, some might even say mythical wooden rims.

Speaking of carbon wheels, someone complimented G-Dawg on his new hoops and wondered if he’d sold his inner ring to pay for them. The proposed advert would have made interesting and somewhat paradoxical reading – for sale, one inner chain ring in pristine, immaculate condition, has done 8,000 miles, but has never been used.

There was no music in the cafes at night, but there was revolution in the air as we waited for OGL to roll up past the allotted start-time. Someone suggested just moving our meeting point to the other side of the bus stop, convinced this small act of rebellion alone would be enough for OGL’s head to explode and for him to start muttering darkly about schisms and breakaway groups in the club.

He finally deigned to roll-up at around 9.33, but if we’d dared to leave on time we’d still be hearing about it now.

I had a brief chuckle with Crazy Legs about Nacer Bouhani, winning the first two stages of the Volta a Catalunya, leading the entire race and points classification, but suddenly feeling so ill that he had to abandon as soon as the tips of the mountains pricked the horizon. He then miraculously recovered enough in time to ride Gent-Wevelgem, over 200 km of super-hard racing. So much for honouring the leader’s jersey.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

Mea Culpa#2 the Prof informed me he did not cart away the fantastic booty of a lost and forlorn Sealskinz glove, as his persistence paid off and he eventually managed to track down its owner – none other than Zardoz, the unlikeliest Cinderella you could possibly imagine.

Reunited with his errant gauntlet at least saved him from riding home with one cold hand while looking like a wannabe Michael Jackson and perhaps it saved everyone else from being subjected to his angry dark-side. I’m not wholly convinced that the Prof didn’t return for the decapitated and eviscerated deer carcass as a sop to his disappointment though.

The elusive Bearded Collie spent time bemoaning the fact that Schwalbe no longer make orange tyres as his original set now appear to be disintegrating from lack of use. He’s busy looking desperately for replacements that will match his frame and save him from reverting to plain and dowdy “just black.”

He also remarked that the time since his last ride with us hadn’t mellowed OGL’s personable, accommodating, benevolent and very sunny outlook. Someone likened OGL to Pol Pot and speculated that club meetings would be over in a snap as he filled all the posts on the committee: President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary et al. Others disagreed though reasoning that OGL could start an argument in a Trappist monastery and probably has to spend huge amounts of time disagreeing with himself.

The Red Max and partner in crime the Monkey Butler Boy were under an ultimatum to clear the conservatory of bikes and bike parts as the rest of the family couldn’t get at the furniture. Aveline slyly suggested the problem wasn’t too many bikes, but too much furniture. For the sake of Max’s continued good health I hope that’s not a line of argument he chooses to pursue.

Meanwhile he’s busily entertaining himself constructing an enormous ziggurat of used and useless bottom brackets (I say useless, but he’s convinced they all still have “some life” left in them). He’s also collected enough lengths of used bike chain to bind Prometheus to the mountain, certain he’ll find a use for it all. Eventually.

The Waffle:

Good Friday was indeed good and looked like being the best day of the Easter weekend. Despite the chill the sky was a high blue vault, randomly studded with the odd, benevolent looking cotton wool cloud and the sun was bright if not warm.

I dropped into valley and chased down a fellow cyclist, drawing in to recognise the Castelli clad back of the benevolent stranger who had appeared to provide me with shelter from a vicious headwind in a ride under very different conditions (Vittoria’s Secret and the Cold Hand Gang, Feb 1.)

Before we split for different routes we had a brief chat and discovered that, like the Ee-Em-Cee rider I randomly encounter, he too was yet another former member and now fugitive of our club. He admired Reg and asked if I was a Barry Sheene fan (I wasn’t) as apparently he used a black, red and yellow livery on his bikes. Well, you learn something every day.

Later, hurtling downhill to race the changing lights through a junction I swept past Shouty heading in the opposite direction and apparently already recovered from her broken femur. She was looking resplendent in her new club’s kit and no doubt off to grind out some hard solo miles.

Despite the chill edge to the wind, there were plenty out wearing shorts, but I have to admit it’s still far too cold to even consider exposing these ancient joints to the elements. As usual time hanging around at the meeting place gave everything the chance to seize up slightly and then it took even longer when riding to warm up and turn with any degree of fluidity.

As a decently large group of 29 riders pushed off, clipped in and rode out, I noticed Aveline was out with us for the 3^rd or 4^th time and in danger of losing her FNG status. I also saw that the elusive Bearded Collie was back with us after a massively long absence of probably a year or so – the Red Max spotted him too and wryly noted that now he knew it was officially Easter.

NOVATEK CAMERA — Rolling out under blue skies

As I drifted through the group I had a brief chat with Laurelan, who was having a bit of trouble with her bike which she’d ridden all through the winter and decided was now in rather desperate need of some TLC at the LBS. She was even attempting to barter gardening skills for cycle maintenance help among the more mechanically capable.

As we pushed out into the countryside we were treated to the years first sighting of Szell, sneaking past, head down and going in the opposite direction, obviously recently awoken from the slumber of deep hibernation and getting in secret training miles so he can put us all to the sword when he decides to next ride with the club.

At some point Laurelan’s front derailleur threw a hissy fit, decided it had done enough for the day and refused to budge. OGL called a halt and thanks to over 50 years of cycle maintenance and professional mechanical knowledge was quickly able to identify the problem and present a precise expert diagnosis; “It’s fucked.”

Now fully enlightened, Laurelan had to make the difficult choice of staying in the inner ring, which would get her up the Quarry climb, but was likely to get her dropped as the speed ramped up toward the café, or choose the big ring and grind and grovel up the climb.

She made her choice and we got going again as I found myself on the front with Captain Black. We were soon swinging right and started the run up to the Quarry, keeping the pace high all the way to the top, where an expected attack from the racing snakes strangely failed to materialise.

Regrouping after the climb, the suggestion seemed to be OGL was planning an extended solo route and was turning off to leave us to our own devices. I’m pretty certain I heard someone say, “Let’s go!”

So I did.

Without really thinking about it I’d accelerated away, as if channelling my inner Red Max with a stupidly long, Forlorn Hope attack, opening up a sizeable gap while those behind just looked on and wondered what the hell I was doing. I must admit to thinking pretty much the same thing myself.

Mea Culpa#3 and apologies all. Apparently my sudden rush of blood to the head (or the legs?) caused a complete disintegration of group order and much shouting from an apoplectic OGL. I say apparently, because I was too far down the road to have actually heard anything, so I’m relying on a bunch of decidedly unreliable witnesses.

I counted the frames my camera took during this madcap venture – there were 30 shots between my escaping the group and the Hammer finally catching my back wheel just as I braked for the Snake Bends. Given the camera is set to take an image every 20 seconds, then I had 10 minutes of solo riding, not daring to look back and wondering where everyone else had gone to, if I’d taken a wrong turn, or if they’d all collectively decided to just head elsewhere and leave me hanging out on my own like an idiot.

My solo break seemed a hell of a lot longer than 10 minutes to me, even as I was trying not to go full bore so I had a little something in reserve for when I was inevitably caught. As it was I was first to the Bends, first to the T-Junction and second on the scamper up the last hill toward the café. I’ll take that any day.

At the café we tried sitting in the garden for a while, but it was just a bit too chilly and when even the Scottish folk declared it was too cold to sit out we admitted defeat and sloped back inside.

On the way home we came across a stricken Prof and Mrs. Prof, marooned at the side of the road with a severe mechanical. Someone asked if they needed help, but the Prof suggested what they needed was more in the way of a taxi and waved us on.

Approaching Berwick Hill I was riding along 2^nd wheel, chatting amiably with the Hammer when something went flying from the bike to tumble away. I slowed and swung over to the side of the road, letting everyone past as I went to retrieve what turned out to be the cap off my bottle. Although somewhat annoyed at having to stop, I realise it could have been a lot worse, I’d never have lived it down if I’d tried to use the bottle and poured the entire contents down my front.

Having found and secured the errant cap I turned around to find Big Dunc had stopped as well, suspecting I’d had a mechanical and everyone had just abandoned me. That was good as it meant I didn’t have to try and chase back on, and together we set a decent pace sweeping up a few stragglers along the way.

Splitting from the group the return was straightforward and without incident. Let’s see what effects my efforts have tomorrow, when it’s the usual Saturday Club Run with limited recovery time.

YTD Totals: 1,606 km /990 miles with 16,238 metres of climbing

Bertie Bassett’s Northern Exposure

Club Run, Saturday 19^th March, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 102 km/64 miles with 945 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 9 minutes

Average Speed: 24.7 km/h

Group size: 38 riders, 4 FNG’s

Temperature: 9°C

Weather in a word or two: Chilly, grey and overcast

Main topic of conversation at the start:

The G-Dawg collective claimed their grandiose-sounding “bike-tree” storage solution has now been fully rotated and locked down into its summer position. Winter bikes will no longer be accessible until the autumn equinox and a blood sacrifice under a new moon.

We wondered if the whole ensemble not only rotated, but dropped securely into a secret vault (to the accompaniment of a soundtrack consisting of Thunderbirds-style pounding drums) where micro-bots and an army of minions would set to work making sure all parts were clean, well-lubricated and gleamed like new.

At one point though I caught G-Dawg’s wistful look as his eyes turned glassy, his lower lip trembled slightly and he asked of no one in particular in a small, plaintive voice, “Does anyone remember Duraglit?”

Micro-bots and minions be damned, this is the only man I know who polishes his chain to a mirror brightness and bemoans the passing of chrome on bikes because it gives him less to furiously burnish.

We envisaged him and Son of G-Dawg working with in tandem in the shade beneath their towering bike tree, with the companionable silence only being interrupted by Son of G-Dawg asking for the green toothbrush, “No, no, I need medium-hard for the chainstays.”

Taffy Steve likened it to Private Benjamin cleaning the latrines with her toothbrush and suggested Son of G-Dawg had emerged from beneath his Pa’s shadow and earned himself a new soubriquet of Private Benjamin. Will it stick?

On cursory inspection Crazy Legs’s helmet failed to pass muster, not because he’d got the angle wrong this time, simply because it was filthy with mud spatters that he claimed were off last week and a particularly muddy patch on the lane to Ogle. I don’t recall there being a muddy stretch there, but the sharp intake of breath from G-Dawg as it was mentioned suggested he did and the recollection didn’t make him at all happy.

Crazy Legs determined that all he needed to do was take off his helmet and lay it on the ground at G-Dawgs feet, the dirt would call seductively to G-Dawg, who wouldn’t be able to resist picking the helmet up and giving it a good clean.

Before he could test this theory however, we were interrupted as an FNG rolled up and asked for mechanical assistance as he couldn’t find bottom gear. G-Dawg broke off long enough to fiddle with the barrel adjuster on his rear derailleur for a few seconds, quickly fettling the problem.

It was then rather cruelly suggested that the FNG didn’t actually want to come on our club run, but had just been riding past, spotted a random gaggle of cyclists and stopped on the off chance he could get his bike sorted quickly. Now though he had no choice but to tag along with us to save face.

Crazy Legs, still on his heavy winter bike then related how the frame had been delivered through the simple expedient of dropping it over a fence into his back yard. On unwrapping he found that the headtube had been dinged and was misshapen. He contacted the supplier only to be told to just hammer an old headset into the frame and that this should sort his problem.

Taffy Steve reflected that only in Britain would you be expected to engage in a spot of aggressive, percussive engineering to fix defective goods that the supplier couldn’t be arsed to deliver properly in the first place, or replace when things went wrong.

We could only imagine what the phone call to the suppliers help-desk sounded like from their end…

“Yes sir, no don’t worry sir, we’ll soon have that fixed. Now do you have the old headset we talked about? Yes, good.”

“And a hammer? Ok, great”

“Now then, can you sit the headset on the frame? Yes, yes, very good.”

“Ok, now hit it with the hammer. Ok, again.”

” Again. Again. And again. And again”

“Ok, I see. Can I just ask, what kind of hammer are you using sir?”

“Ah, no, actually we need a lump hammer for this type of work…”

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

We found a lone Sealskinz glove on the café floor and after a long and fruitless Cinderella-style search couldn’t find a princess worthy of it. Odd, I would have thought that anyone leaving the café with but a single-glove would actually realise their loss before they’d gone too far.

Unclaimed, I suspect the Prof probably snaffled it and transported it home to his secret workshop/laboratory/lair to add to his horde of random cast-offs, discarded flotsam and jetsam and sundry road-kill. Goodness knows what he’ll finally make with it, or what it will look like when it remerges into the light of day.

An old couple pushed open the café door, saw the place was mobbed with unruly cyclists and that every table was taken. They did an abrupt about-face, leaving the door to swing open behind them in a fit of pique. Taffy Steve felt it was about time the café installed an electronic door closer for moments like this, but I argued a trained monkey would be a better choice and much more entertaining.

There was then some debate about whether a dog was easier to train than a monkey, with a forceful case for our canine cousins being made because you can point and a dog will look immediately at what you’re pointing at, while a monkey will just look all around in disinterest. (I know from bitter experience that if you point for a cat it’ll just stare fixedly at your finger until you get bored, it gets bored, or it decides to attack your hand.)

Caracol then settled the argument by suggesting what we actually needed was a trained monkey that could point at the open door and then direct a dog to go and close it. Somewhere along the line someone suggested dolphins should be considered in the mix because of their high intelligence, but this was patently preposterous as everyone knows they have big problems with door handles.

Sneaky Pete sneaked up and sneaked straight into a space we’d cleared for a recently arrived Crazy Legs, who’d finally returned from his ride of splendid isolation. G-Dawg was happy to remind Pete of the time he treated us all to a wide band of exposed flesh between his too short shorts and too short leg warmers. I think this encounter has possibly scarred G-Dawg for life and he shuddered just recalling it.

Richard of Flanders commended me on my pan-European, all-embracing approach to cycling attire, adjudging my new Tørm jersey to be Spanish and following on from my German Bundisliga(?) and Belgian Lion of Flanders theming.

The Tørm jersey is a lot more sedate than my usual attire, plain black with just simple red and yellow bands across chest and sleeve, but it does nicely match my bike frame…and, err, wheels and tyres… and, err water bottle and overshoes … oh and shorts.

Never mind pan-European, Taffy Steve concluded that I just looked like a giant Liquorice Allsort and only needed a bobbly, blue Tam O’Shanter or perhaps one of those weird, bumpy Catlike Whisper helmets in UN Peacekeeping Force colours to create an uncanny resemblance to Bertie Bassett.

The Waffle:

I think I might have lit the blue touch paper by outing Zakaria Amirouch who has now garnered disparaging mentions on our Faecesbook page and prompted one or two calls to try and find a solution to his unwelcome omniscience.

Our megalomaniac interloper has joined 1,242 separate Strava Groups according to beZ – I won’t question his undoubted dedication, attention to detail and mathematic skills in computing this, but I am somewhat nonplussed that he had the time or will to sit and do it. I somehow suspect we may be returning to this topic…

Saturday and another dry if chilly day meant there was no question that it was another outing for Reg and my freewheel sang with joy as we dropped off the hill and into the valley. On arriving at the lights on the bridge I once again encountered the Ee-Em-Cee rider from a couple of weeks ago, this time off to meet his clubmates before a pre-planned long run, a 100 mile trip up to Alnmouth and back.

I had a much more modest distance in mind, finding the legs somewhat heavy after 3 commutes in the week, including one on Friday that was interspersed with a 20 minute, 9.6 kilometre stint on a Watt bike as part of our office Sports Relief effort. I swung east after crossing the river while the Ee-Em-Cee rider turned west and rode off to begin his grand adventure.

Sur La Jante modelling the new “Liquorice Allsorts” range from Tørm

Yet again there was a massive turnout at the meeting place, with riders sprawled across the pavement and ready for the off. Before we could do this though even more servicing was required on the FNG’s ailing bike, with OGL stepping up to the plate this time with some assured mechanical nous.

When we finally roused ourselves to get going it was a large group of 38 riders pushing off, clipping in and heading out, including Red Max riding shotgun on the Monkey Butler Boy again and one of the more capable FNG’s returning from the previous week.

Taffy Steve later reported that this FNG had enjoyed her ride out the previous Saturday and he’d congratulated her as she never seemed to be in any trouble and had handled everything with aplomb. He later realised he’d probably and unwittingly sounded incredibly patronising and it would serve him right if he found out he’d been talking to the Scottish junior national time-trial champion or someone equally as accomplished.

I hit the front with Crazy Legs and led everyone out through the Great North Cyclemaze in a long, snaking line. Crazy Legs mentioned how chilly it was and was explaining how he’d dithered between full length and three quarters bib tights before finally resorting to asking his wife for advice.

When he said he was concerned three quarter tights were too risky I misheard and thought he’d said they were too risqué. This left me briefly wondering if Mrs. Crazy Legs was partial to a pair of well-turned ankles, or perhaps demanded even piano legs be covered to prevent immodesty.

We then had a discussion about whether a world champion cape would be a better alternative to a rainbow jersey and I felt consummate showman Peter Sagan would definitely be up for it. Crazy Legs suggested domestiques would have to carry the ends of the cape, like a wedding train, until the rider got up sufficient speed for it to stream out behind him. It all seemed doable – why isn’t the UCI acting?

This harmless nonsense kept us amused until we’d driven everyone up the climb past the Cheese Farm, where we pulled over and waved the next group through and onto the front. I tried dropping back through the pack, but there was some reluctance for anyone to drift too close to the front, so I slotted into second wheel, briefly chatting with OGL, the Monkey Butler Boy and Taffy Steve as everyone shuffled position.

Crazy Legs, who said he hated riding in big groups, eased backwards with far more success and I didn’t see him again until he turned up late at the café, apparently having ridden off on his own after deciding that either he, or his heavy winter bike weren’t up for the mass hurtle to the café.

At one point the façade cracked and we caught a glimpse of the real Zardoz behind his mask of avuncular bonhomie with a brief reprise of last week’s “angriest man in the peloton.” This time he mock-growled at the Monkey Butler Boy, who’d apparently had the audacity to overtake him on a hill. Listening-in intently, the Red Max was convulsed by a paroxysm of evil giggles.

After we split and waved off the amblers I fell in with the BFG, back onto his ultra-modern, all carbon-on-carbon, uber-machine. He does like to change things up. He told me that earlier in the week he’d only narrowly avoided setting fire to his wheels and crashing his brand new bike after somehow mistakenly fitting non-carbon specific brake blokes. These had melted under extreme heat and apparently produced an aroma he suggested was akin to roast pork.

We swept down into the valley and up the rise to Hartburn, somehow passing the amblers group who were pulled over to the side of the road while they worked to fix yet another mechanical on the FNG’s bike. I was beginning to think maybe he’d only come out to get a free bike service.

As we turned off on a route that by-passed Middleton Bank I confessed to Taffy Steve that I was heavy-legged and happy we’d chosen the slightly shorter run in, but he just snorted in derision and said my inner demons would have kicked in and compelled me to attack Middleton Bank as soon as we hit the lower slopes, no matter how much it hurt. Hmm, maybe.

At some point we passed a decapitated and eviscerated deer corpse, flung violently to the side of the road by a car, a particularly vivid and gruesome reminder of the danger of RIM encounters. Thankfully it was too large and messy to fit in the Prof’s back pockets and he didn’t have time to stop and sling it across the front of his bike.

roadkill — If he’d been able to add a deer carcass AND stray glove the Prof might have been convinced all his birthdays had come at once

A few short, sharp climbs later we regrouped (well, more or less) and began the push for the café. Rab Dee led off, trying to keep a reasonable speed until Taffy Steve attacked, his acceleration snapping the knots out of our line like a string pulled suddenly taut and we were quickly lined out and racing along.

We stormed through Milestone Woods and over the rollers, down the last dip and began the climb up to the café. Rounding the last bend G-Dawg and Strummer sprinted away to contest the sprint, while I rode up the outside, passing everyone in front of me who seemed to be flagging, falling off the pace and drifting over to grind up the far side of the road.

At the last rise I sensed more than saw riders on my backwheel, eased out of the saddle and with the last few dregs of energy tried to accelerate up the final slope, hearing or perhaps just fancifully imagining, a groan of dismay from behind.

As it was the kick seemed to have dragged me well clear of everyone else and I closed and latched onto the now freewheeling G-Dawg, quietly buoyed by being able to put space between myself and the rest of the chasers.

Leaving the café Crazy Legs led a splinter group for a slightly longer ride home, taking G-Dawg with him, ostensibly so he could avoid the muddy patch that had so infuriated him last week. There was a huge amount of dithering around by those left behind and getting sick of the delay Taffy Steve gave up and kicked off for home.

I followed him and we enjoyed a companionable and unremarkable ride back, expecting to be overhauled by the rest of the group, but seeing neither hide nor hair of them. Perhaps they’d been delayed when the FNG’s bike needed one last fix?

As I turned off for my solo effort I actually felt stronger than I had when setting out and powered my way home in good time and without incident, all in time to catch the end of a very entertaining Milan-San Remo.

Another grand day out, capped by a startling conversation with Daughter#1 after we’d spent a little time laughing at Sean Kelly’s accent :

Daughter#1: “Do you think we’d make a good comedy double-act?”

SLJ: “Yes, as long as you play the straight man”

Daughter#1: “Does one of them always have to be gay?”

Sigh.

YTD Totals: 1,489 km /925 miles with 15,193 metres of climbing

Monumental Impediments

Club Run, Saturday 12^th March, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 112 km/70 miles with 1,000 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 17 minutes

Average Speed: 26.0 km/h

Group size: 33 riders, 5 FNG’s

Temperature: 13°C

Weather in a word or two: Splendid

pa NOTICE

Main topic of conversation at the start:

I arrived at the meeting point to find a glowering BFG being warily circled by a couple of FNG’s who were keeping their distance and not daring to approach until I arrived to show them he was actually quite harmless.

Just to be contrary the BFG has resorted to type and was once again out on something venerable and vintage and made of steel. He’d even thought about adding a fake nut to the top of his stem just to see if he could inspire OGL to once again tell us the tale of how he ripped his scrotum open on one during a track meet. It’s a tale that never grows old in the telling…

Crazy Legs’s 39 days must have been up as he appeared sporting his new, faithfully and painstakingly reproduced Oakley Jawbreakers. Very smart. Attracted by the spectacle(s) the Prof then emerged through a milling crowd of cyclists to give him a hug – seemingly one of many that would take place throughout the day.

The Prof then stopped by to acknowledge how much he looks forward to his mentions in this humble blog. He is of course one of the more frequently featured characters, though trailing a somewhat distant second to his tiny, leaky bladder.

OGL arrived and dipped his head to fully reveal his new helmet, emblazoned with the club name across the top. What next, custom mudguards in club colours? Where will it end?

He then proceeded to have a bizarre conversation with one of the FNG’s when she stepped forward to introduce herself:

“You phoned me last Wednesday?”

“Err, no I e-mailed you last week”

“But you texted me yesterday?”

“Err, no I emailed last week”

“So was it you who messaged me on Facebook?”

“Err, no …”

Oh well, she passed the first test – showing patience and empathy for the infirm and senile.

One of the other FNG’s was having trouble with his bike, which was laid supine as he did something indescribable to the seat post. For one dread moment I thought we were going to be accompanied all the way around by someone else insisting that you don’t need a saddle, but thankfully he finally had it sorted.

His girlfriend cheerfully informed us they’d ridden across the Alps together, but that was two years ago and they hadn’t done a lot since. I assured her we wouldn’t be tackling any Alps today, but had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to end well.

The boyfriend had a decent enough bike and seemed to know his way around an Allen key, but rather oddly was wearing white football shorts over his bibshorts and had his helmet on at a rather odd, rakish angle. Maybe it’s incipient OCD or something, but I have to admit the latter is something I just can’t abide – I often have to adjust Crazy Legs’s helmet at the café so it sits just right before I’ll let him be seen out in public with us.

We were doing that usual cyclist trick of spilling aimlessly across the entire pavement, engrossed in waves of endless, nonsensical banter and completely oblivious to the fact that bikes and bodies had formed a rather formidable and impenetrable maze.

One old biddy was having trouble threading her way amongst us with her wheeled shopping bag until Richard of Flanders emitted an ear-drum shattering bellow that shocked us into silence and had us parting like the Red Sea.

Unfortunately, his aural assault caused the old biddy to almost leap out of her skin with fright and when she clutched at her chest and wavered I thought she was going to have a heart attack and topple head first into the shopping trolley. Luckily she recovered and casting fearful looks at us all scuttled away as quickly as she could manage.

Crazy Legs was left to ponder if the shock had been fatal whether we would have sprayed her shopping trolley white and chained it to a nearby lamppost like one of those Ghost Bikes left as a memorial to killed and injured cyclists.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

Taffy Steve was out on his titanium love-child and declared the thrice-cursed winter bike had been put into deep storage for the rest of the year, having first removed the pedals in case they seized up. He then suggested he hadn’t loosened the seat clamp because he didn’t really care if the seat tube seized in the frame, reasoning that he’d stopped growing, so couldn’t foresee a need to alter his riding position.

G-Dawg wondered if a seized seat tube meant you could totally remove the clamp and save few crucial micrograms, then remembered a recent run where a malfunctioning clamp saw a saddle slowly sink lower and lower until the rider was pedalling with his knees around his ears. Not a good idea then.

Thoughts turned to the round-ball game as notable local events were somewhat dominated by the conviction of Adam Johnson and the appointment of Rafael Benitez. No one quite knew which one had drawn the worst sentence.

Someone even suggested that Mr. Johnson was likely to be the happier of the two as he would now be referred to as Adam Johnson the paedophile rather than Adam Johnson the Sunderland player. Ouch.

Everyone was baffled by Rafa citing being close to his family as a reason for venturing back to “Northern England” and surprisingly it wasn’t the fact that we actually consider Liverpool be in the South that caused the confusion. What was troubling was that Rafael Benitez, well-travelled, urbane and international football manager at the likes of Madrid, Tenerife, Valencia, Naples and Milan, chose to leave his family in Liverpool. We wondered if he’d consider Wallsend or possibly Byker as a suitable place for future re-location.

Thoughts turned to much more engaging and worthwhile sporting endeavours with the Classics just around the corner and both Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico in full swing. Thinking of the latter, Shoeless demanded to know what the “big, fuck-off pointy pitchfork thing” was all about.

Spry, something of an expert on esoteric cycling trophies as highlighted by a page of his blog (The Weird and Wonderful World of Cycling Trophies funnily enough) patiently explained that it was representative of Neptune’s trident as the Tirreno-Adriatico was a race run between the two seas. We then speculated on how the race could be improved if the leading rider was made to carry the trident along with them.

It was a short step from there to imagining a handicap system where riders were obliged to carry the trophies of their previous conquests, something that would be particularly debilitating for Fabian Cancellara and we imagined him bent almost double and shuffling awkwardly to the Paris-Roubaix sign-on, burdened down with the three huge cobble-stones stuffed in his back pockets.

ta pr trophy — The Weird and Wonderful World of Cycling Trophies

Next up on our agenda for searing insight and erudite comment was Paris-Nice and the chances of Geraint Thomas taking an historic first win, always recognising of course his penchant for falling off his bike at the most inopportune time. Someone mentioned he’d crashed once already, apparently while trying to dislodge a stone caught between his saddle and frame. Fanciful I know, but it was a short step from there to imagining a smug and smiling Fabian Cancellara riding behind him and winking at the camera, happy to have used his astonishing sleight of hand to palm one of his cobblestones off on an unwitting dupe.

The Prof stopped by our table on his way to the toilet, pausing long enough for a quick hug with Crazy Legs. Taffy Steve suggested their homo-erotic displays were becoming a bit much and suggested they might want to think about getting a room. He then ventured to suggest a bit of prostate milking might actually help with the Prof’s constant urge to wee.

At this point OGL approached, snapping on a pair of latex surgical gloves and we all recoiled in horror at what we thought was about to unfold. Much to our relief he neatly side-stepped our table and began to work fixing a puncture on Laurelan’s bike.

Needless to say the Prof claimed the discarded inner tube to add to his growing treasure trove of cast-off bits and pieces and road-kill. OGL recounted visiting the Prof’s secret laboratory/workshop/lair and finding rows and rows of used inner tubes all bizarrely hanging out to dry on the washing line.

The Waffle:

So, who the fuck is Zakaria Amirouch?

Actually that’s a bit of a rhetorical question, I know that Zakaria Amairouch is a cyclist in Tetouan, Morocco. I guess what I really want to know is why does he feel the need to post his rides on our club Strava group? As far as I know Zakaria Amarouch has no connection with the club, has never been to the North East, doesn’t ride the same routes as the rest of us and doesn’t choose to interact with us in any way shape or form, either through Strava or any other channel.

So what exactly does he get out of it? Are we meant to be impressed by his mileage totals, huge rides, stupid photos, KoM’s or his single-minded, some would say borderline psychotic dedication to hunt down and join every single Strava group that exists? Do me a favour Zakaria and fuck off.

Sorry, rant over.

So the much anticipated day arrived, Spring is upon us and the promise of fine dry weather has riders across the region rubbing their hands with unfettered glee as they stow away winter bikes and carefully awaken carbon beasts from deep slumber.

As I gently lift Reg out from his nest between my single-speed and rat-bag mountain bike I can only marvel at how light it is. Don’t get me wrong this is no super-lightweight, fully carbon-outfitted, uber-machine with all the most exotic components. Nor is it anywhere close to troubling the UCI and their preposterous 6.8kg weight limit, but at bang on 9 kilos fully loaded it’s considerably and very noticeably lighter than the Peugeot.

I’d checked the bike over the night before, inflated the tyres with a new, super-slick BBB track pump, and fitted a mount for my knock-off GoPro onto the saddle rails. I was good to go and eager to start.

I’d forgotten how much fun it is to ride on a twitchy, responsive carbon blade and as I dropped down to the valley floor I found I was clipping along two miles an hour faster than usual, stretched out by the different geometry and grinning like an idiot. I don’t think the bike is actually worth an extra 2 miles an hour, I was simply riding on a wave of pure exuberance and joie d’ vivre.

Even the lights on the bridge were in my favour and I skipped over the river without stopping and began spinning up the other side of the valley, looking forward to a good ride out. I wasn’t alone at the meeting place, finding just about everyone had abandoned mudguards and heavy winter bikes in favour of their “Saturday best”.

G-Dawg even turned up wearing shorts, resolutely declaring it was Spring and there was no turning back now.

The relatively mild and dry conditions had undoubtedly been a big draw and around 33 riders and a smattering of FNG’s pushed off, clipped in and rode out. At this point the BFG rolled past me and declared he thought he’d seen everything, but this was the first time we’d had a bike with a kickstand out on the club run.

I fell in with the Prof who informed me the Frankenbike, my old crashed and trashed Focus that he had repaired and restored to life in his secret laboratory/lair/workshop, was being honourably retired from service now that he’d found a frame that was a better fit for Mrs. Prof.

He then revealed his dirtiest, darkest secret, admitting he would consider buying a bike with normal sized wheels if he could only find one that increased in value rather than depreciated. Despite my uncertainty he seemed convinced such bikes exist, although even if they do I’m not sure that appreciating value would be one of my major (or even very, very minor) considerations when buying a new bike.

Somewhere around this point I hit a pot and with a loud clatter my pretend GoPro launched from under my saddle and bounced alarmingly across the road. The FNG in football shorts retrieved it for me and handed it across. A quick check seemed to suggest that it was as shockproof as claimed, but the retaining bolt that kept it fixed to the bracket had worked loose and disappeared. There was no quick way of fixing the camera back in position, so I tucked it away into a back pocket and pressed on. It’s a shame, because I was quite impressed with some of the backward facing shots I had managed to gather in the short time it was working.

I then began what would become the first of many chases to catch back onto our group. Having accomplished this, I found myself slotting in right at the back, where Pierre Rolland look-alike, Spry (not facially, but I can see a definite similarity in style and form on the bike), was cruising along with his dad, Andeven.

As we hit the bottom of Berwick Hill, the FNG accompanying the one in football shorts began to slide swiftly backwards and I watched as a gap between the front and back of our group yawned quickly open.

Andeven skipped around her and gave chase, while I waited a little longer. When it became obvious that even if she made it back up to our group she’d never complete the ride, I pulled out and started my own chase back.

As I closed over the top of the hill I passed a faltering Arnold who said he was doing ok and then found Laurelan who was somewhat detached from our group and drifting backwards. She said she was ok too, but was worried about Arnold who, despite his assertions wasn’t ok and wasn’t feeling all that good.

I noticed OGL dropping back off the front group to see what was happening, so relayed across to him to let him know the FNG’s were well adrift and Arnold was suffering. He went back to investigate further and lend assistance while I gave chase again.

Catching up with the group, I found myself riding alongside Zardoz who was fighting to stave off the incipient onset of serious man flu and reported that someone had broken into his shed and nicked his winter bike. Both perhaps valid reasons for Crazy Legs to declare that Zardoz was the angriest man riding that day, especially after an altercation with a RIM who refused to slow down as he drove toward us down a narrow country lane

This encounter had Zardoz’s moustaches brisling like a face-off between angry tomcats and had him swearing through them with an admirable degree of fluidity and imagination. Gone was the mask of twinkle-eyed, avuncular, bon homie he usually adopts – here was the real cold-hearted cycling assassin revealed in all his dark majesty.

NOVATEK CAMERA

At some point OGL hauled ass past me, breathing hard, but able to gasp out that there’d been no sight of the FNG’s when he went back to look for them and that they must have abandoned the ride. At the rather inevitable pee stop I found that both Laurelan and Arnold had managed to re-join however and did indeed seem ok.

After this short break I found myself riding with Crazy Legs, who like Zardoz was also suffering from incipient man-flu and blaming his infection on sitting next to a 6’4” Irish Elvis impersonator during a business meeting. From my understanding the Elvis impersonator was an all-round good bloke who had been skilled enough at his craft to get a paying gig in Las Vegas. I never did work out what an IT firm needed an Elvis impersonator for though.

As we started up a steep hill behind the BFG, there was an audible hiss of escaping air and Crazy Legs called out, “Puncture!” The BFG dutifully relayed the call up the line, then turned to ask who’d punctured. I could see Crazy Legs giving himself a mental face-palm as he pointed to the BFG’s rear tyre and replied with a sparse, “You have…”

We all gathered together at the top of the hill to wait for repairs to be made. OGL decided that we should split the group and that depending on which group the BFG wanted to ride with the others could press on while the rest waited.

Crazy Legs trailed down the hill to ask the question and then dragged himself back up to inform us the BFG had said he would decide when he re-joined!

Finally underway again, we began travelling down a road where all the potholes had been marked with big yellow brackets spay-painted around them. I assume this means that they’re eventually going to repair the road, but even if they don’t the paint did a great job of showing us which bits to avoid.

The Red Max went off on what, even by his own crazed standards, was an impressively long and very ambitious lone break. At one point Spry said he was thinking of bridging across so the pair could work together, then realised we were bearing down on Middleton Bank and Red Max would soon be engulfed in an unequal duel with gravity and unlikely to be in position to offer much assistance.

Despite the daunting obstacle of the climb to come, Carlton and Cowin’ Bovril seemed determined to bring Max to heel sooner rather than later and whipped up the pace of the pursuit.

We turned right at a junction that dumped us directly onto the bottom of the climb, which was good as there was no time to even think about finding the right gear and less chance of making a mess of things like I did the week before.

Andeven attacked from the very bottom of the climb and quickly pulled away, while I slotted in behind Shoeless as the slope began to bite. As we hit the steepest section I levered myself out of the saddle and swung across the white line, accelerating upwards. Bit by bit I overhauled Shoeless and started to creep past G-Dawg. There was a shout of “car!” from someone at the back and I looked behind to find I’d opened up a big enough gap to slot into, so I swung back across the road and out of danger.

It was now just a case of keeping going, as I slumped back in the saddle, hugging the left hand gutter so there was plenty of room for anyone to pass me. I had no idea what was going on behind, or where the others were and couldn’t hear a thing beyond my rasping, panting breath. I was gasping like an asthmatic chain-smoker with emphysema being forced to run wind sprints up a mountain and it would took another 2 or 3 miles before my breathing returned to normal.

I was however slowly closing on Andeven and might have caught his back wheel if the slope had continued another 200 metres or so. It’s also just as likely I would have collapsed in a jelly-legged heap if the slope had continued another 200 metres or so, as it was the road levelled and Andeven pulled away again.

At this point I just kept going, recognising I was breaking club protocol by not waiting to regroup at the top of the climb, but reasoning that I was so winded and slow that everyone would overhaul me eventually. Then Shoeless cruised past, I jumped onto his wheel and all thoughts of regrouping were conveniently forgotten as he accelerated away – when confronted by my misdeeds age, enfeeblement and senility have been my excuse in the past and I was sure they would serve me again now.

We picked up Andeven and from what I recall G-Dawg, Plank and Captain Black made it across as we drove for home in front of what I gather was a rather frenzied chase behind. Everyone in the front group swept past me on the final climb, but after blowing last week’s assault on Middleton Bank I was just pleased not to have messed up again and as an added bonus managed to net a new Strava PR for my efforts.

It was pleasant enough for us to encamp in the café garden, with everyone (well, maybe all apart from Zardoz) in high spirits, on top form and full of the usual unfettered, unrelenting torrent of irreverent banter to keep us royally entertained.

A pleasant return leg, mainly spent chatting with Zardoz (he didn’t really seem all that angry) and a good solo run for home capped the best ride of the year.

So far.

YTD Totals: 1,326 km /824 miles with 13,346 metres of climbing

Black Mirror

Club Run, Saturday 5^th March, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 102 km/63 miles with 997 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 17 minutes

Average Speed: 23.7 km/h

Group size: 32 riders, no FNG’s

Temperature: 7°C

Weather in a word or two: Bright to bruising

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Crazy Legs was still counting down the incomprehensibly precise 39 days until the arrival of his new, fake Oakley jawbone specs from the Far East and wondering what sort of subtle Chinglish branding might adorn them.

We speculated that 39 days was the amount of time to gather enough orders to make it worthwhile breaking into the factory at night for a quick production run, sort of the cycling equivalent of the shoemaking elves in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

It was a small leap of logic to then wonder if these were the same magic elves who mysteriously clean and pimp Son of G-Dawgs bike whenever he leaves it in his Pa’s garage overnight.

Ovis appeared in one of the thoroughly indestructible jerseys from his old Triathlon club which appeared to have cannibalistically part-consumed another jersey, leaving only the tell-tale sign of a faint branding transfer where there should have been none. Appropriately for Ovis, it’s all a bit “Silence of the Lambs”, with the Buffalo Bill jersey first skinning and then wearing its conquests like a second skin.

It now seems certain that at least one of his seemingly endless stock of identical jerseys has mutated, perhaps as a result of the successful stress-testing undertaken on the kit to give it that bright, acid yellow colour that appears nowhere in the natural world, as well as to check it will survive through an all-out thermonuclear war.

The mutated, uber- jersey is now quite obviously sentient and intent on growing stronger by absorbing all the other jerseys and garments in Ovis’s collection through forcible osmosis – a strange, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle for lycra supremacy.

A discussion about solid rubber tyres had OGL reminiscing misty-eyed about pram tyres which were apparently delivered as one long coil of rubber that had to be cut to size to fit the wheel diameter and then secured in place with a stripped wire core that was twisted into a cork-screw gimlet, before the whole thing was folded over itself. I didn’t quite understand the baffling intricacies, but I was certainly convinced they were a complete and utter bastard to fit. Think I’ll stick with clinchers.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

Ovis stood in the queue with a face almost unrecognisable behind patchwork spatters of mud and dirt and grime, pointed at my similarly begrimed face and laughed out loud. We were all and without exception utterly filthy. I deployed my buff for official use #43 and managed to wipe at least some of the excess crud away, but I still needed the coffee to wash the grit out from between my teeth.

G-Dawg had been in a gym where a static bike complete with monitor had let him simulate an Alpine climb. His verdict was that it wasn’t particularly impressive, but better than staring at the wall. I queried whether there weren’t more rewarding, err, distractions in the gym, but we all agreed that we were beyond the age when we could safely lift our eyes up from the floor in such environments.

This led to general discussion about how uncomfortable and careful we feel we have to be around children these days. Taffy Steve talked about a recent social experiment when observers set a lost-looking child to wander around a shopping centre just to see how people interacted with them.

After being studiously ignored for an uncomfortable amount of time, a Scout Master was finally brave enough to cautiously approach the child to find out if they needed help, moving carefully from downwind while maintaining eye-contact and a safe exclusion zone of at least 3 metres. What’s the world coming to, eh?

Another Engine then back-tracked on a story about “his paperboy” to explain his paperboy isn’t actually his paperboy because:

He doesn’t deliver their paper and
They don’t actually have a paper-delivered

Anyway, the actual kernel of this story is that the paper-boy who operates in Another Engine’s street rides a bike with a chain so rusty that it’s ginger and furry and squeaks like a demented polecat with its paw caught in a snare.

In the old days Another Engine would have combined his benevolent, avuncular nature, keen understanding of cycling mechanics and easy access to machine oil to provide a lubricating salve to the offending chain, before affectionately patting the lad on the head and sending him off, probably with a spare ha’penny so he could buy his own oil for next time.

Now Another Engine says he sees the lad and just crosses the road, realising that any offer of help is likely to be dangerously misconstrued. We were of course determined to find a way to make innocent assistance sound as damning as possible, with suggested euphemistic approaches such as, “Does your chain need a good lubing?” or, “Step into the hallway and I’ll give you a bit of oily relief.” Things were admittedly juvenile and shockingly low brow, but thankfully Szell, the master of the single-entendre wasn’t around to drag the conversation even lower than we’d managed to achieve all by ourselves.

Taffy Steve was left to once again ponder the vagaries of Italian sizing and wonder aloud where their rugby team managed to find clothing to fit a proper props body. Aether speculated that Evans Cycles and Evans “plus size” shops were in fact one and the same and they had tricked us all into thinking UK cycling kit was the norm when in fact it was all over-sized.

Ride Profile

The Waffle:

The day started in the worst possible way, a sudden chilling downpour that had the roads instantly awash with surface water. My Garmin seemed to be struggling mightily with the atmospheric conditions and I had to reboot it 2 or 3 times before it could even find a satellite. Meanwhile the rain and road spray quickly soaked through my overshoes to my shoes and socks and tights and gloves became unpleasantly damp and chilled.

At the bridge a local rowing club were completing shuttle runs in the pouring rain, chanting en masse about closing with the enemy and killing them with their bare hands, driven along like rookie marines under the tutelage of a beasting, sadistic drill sergeant. Odd.

While stopped at the lights I exchanged pleasantries with an Eee-Emm-Cee rider (I believe they started out as an offshoot of our club) utilising the traditional and UCI approved cycling lexicon and subject guide:

“How do?”

”Going far?”

“Do you think the rain’ll ever stop?”

As I started to retrace my route on the opposite side of the river one half of the sky was smothered in an angry towering mass of ominously thick, dirty grey cloud while ahead a swollen sun had just about pulled itself over the horizon into startling clear sky and burned down with shattering brilliance, the light bouncing savagely back off wet tarmac that burned like a black mirror.

I began to worry that drivers approaching from behind would be blinded and unable to see me and kept as far left as I could, almost riding in the gutter and flicking on my rear light, even though I suspected it would be far too feeble to provide any counter against the suns vicious glare.

At one point the road was reflecting the sun so brilliantly that I had trouble looking forward and if the car in the outside lane hadn’t come to a sudden halt I would have sailed straight through a junction, completely oblivious to the red light that was demanding I stop.

Turning to climb up the other side of the valley and putting the sun behind me brought some welcome relief, even with the front wheel ripping through the stream that poured down the inside of the road. The rain finally started to ease just as I made it to the meeting point, intact but uncomfortably damp around the edges.

With it being the first Saturday in the month the kids were out to accompany us some of the way, and there was a good turnout of over 30 riders including the Red Max’s son, the Monkey Butler Boy set to ride the entire route with us.

With the rain easing I slipped off and stowed the waterproof, before we pushed off, clipped in and sailed out.

I dropped into line near the back and alongside Mini Miss, chatting as we pushed along. At one point we swung by Red Max and he paused from shouting abuse encouragement at the Monkey Butler Boy long enough to confirm he’d recovered from the desperate ride he inadvisably completed in the throes of his illness, despite being flushed out the back of the bunch like a blue ice meteorite from a 747. Mini Miss said she’d been concerned and continuously checking on Strava until he’d posted up his ride to prove he’d made finally made it home.

At a quick, Prof encouraged pee stop we learned from OGL that peeing au naturel had inspired the first weed-killers. He then went on to correct the unforgiveable gaping hole in my education with a discourse on Scottish and Newcastle brewing and the genesis of Newcastle Brown Ale.

Taking the open road, as distinct from last weeks closed road, we clambered and climbed and swooped and regrouped until the time came to split away from the amblers for a slightly harder, faster and longer run to the café. The Red Max left with the slightly more sedate group, understandably taking the Monkey Butler Boy with him, along with a distinctly under the weather Son of G-Dawg

As our group approached Middleton Bank I was castigated for freewheeling past all the fixies, but they had the last laugh as I hit the bottom slopes at high speed and in completely the wrong gear. I found my legs spinning as fast as theirs had on the descent, but there was no resistance.

Figuring it was too late to go hunting for another gear and being inherently lazy I let everyone sweep past and freewheeled until the slope finally began to bite and I could actually gain some traction, only then was I able to set off in pursuit of everyone else.

It seems to have been an age since we last tackled Middleton Bank, so it was good to know it’s still hateful and the gradient remains awkward enough to confuse me so I rarely feel I’m in the right gear.

Everyone regrouped over the top and we set off for the café, gradually winding the speed up. This was it, this was fun bit – a dozen or so of us in a tight bunch, hurtling around corners at break-neck speed, shoulder to shoulder and inches from the wheel in front as the pace ramped up along with a booming heart rate.

Legs burning, a face-full of grit and cold spray, leaning hard into the corners and scrambling up the hills as we jockeyed for position and raced along finely poised between exhilaration and catastrophic disaster. It hurt, but I found myself grinning like an idiot.

As the front of our arrow-head hit the final slopes on the drag up to the café it shed riders like bits of sabot being stripped from an armour piercing shell. I clung to Crazy Legs’s wheel as long as I could before sitting-up and drifting back as Taffy Steve swept past with Laurelan in hot pursuit. Great fun.

On the return the Mad Mile proved not quite as breakneck with Son of G-Dawg obviously suffering and I surfed along on the back, getting a mighty slingshot around the roundabout as I split for home. I found myself briefly in the company of the Cow Ranger who wanted to put in a few extra miles and as I left him and turned uphill the hail started pelting down, ticking off my helmet and seemingly intent on filling up the vents.

The hailstorm accompanied me almost all the way home, rattling and pinging off car roofs while bouncing and drumming off the road. It wasn’t particularly unpleasant as I was well wrapped up and it was falling more or less vertically so couldn’t find any exposed skin to sting. I soon found myself happily swinging up onto Heinous Hill to cap another good run.

YTD Totals: 1,155 km /718 miles with 11,547 metres of climbing

An Epiphany on the Road to Dinnington

Club Run, Saturday 27^th February, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 97 km/60 miles with 940 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 10 minutes

Average Speed: 23.3 km/h

Group size: 16 riders, no FNG’s

Temperature: 6°C

Weather in a word or two: Brittle

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Eschewing his love of all things esoteric, eccentric and vintage, the BFG rolled up and right into the 21^st Century on a new bike made of all things carbon, with added carbon and featuring absolutely no naturally occurring or biodegradable substances whatsoever. No wood, no leather, no cotton, no latex, nor steel, no cork, no bamboo, no graphite, no ivory, bone, ambergris, yak hair nor elephant scrotum. What? My world was instantly turned upside down.

His new love is a second-hand, immaculately kept Scott Team Foil in a size that’s so big it can only be referred to by a series of Roman numerals – in other words it’s as big as the Superbowl, although I see even the all-encompassing pomposity of the “World Championship” of American Football has had to admit defeat and dumb itself down as its fans couldn’t cope with Peyton Place Manning and the Denver Broncos winning Superbowl L.

Apparently the BFG was in serial domestic trouble on several fronts, it was bad enough that he announced he was buying a new bike, Mrs BFG is almost used to that, but she got a shock when he spent 100 times more than he usually does and then turned up with just a large lump of plastic – he might as well have traded his money for a handful of magic beans…

Then he was caught gazing lovingly at Mrs. BFG throughout the evening, only for her to finally realise his eyes were actually directed over her shoulder and into the conservatory where his new, shiny bike was sitting and winking back at him. Oh dear.

It reminded me of the time one our guys bought and fell in love with a super-smart Dolan with a custom paint job. “Does it sleep in the same bed?” I innocently asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“Doesn’t your wife object?”

“Well, no, she’s too busy standing guard downstairs.”

Taffy Steve then recoiled in absolute horror from the saddle on the Scott Foil which was nothing but a thin sliver of razor sharp carbon fibre and “just not right.”

Like signalling the end to an uneasily held ceasefire, a number of riders turned up on their best, summer bikes seeking to rival the BFG’s new mount in the bling stakes. Their argument, it’ll officially be Spring in a few days anyway. Then OGL turned up to inform us that Shouty had slipped over on black ice mid-week and broken her femur, so it would be fair to say winter isn’t over yet.

I was hoping that OGL might adopt a mock Churchillian voice (the PM, obviously, not the stupid insurance dog) and intone with suitable gravitas, “No this is not the end of winter. It is not even the beginning of the end of winter. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of winter …”

It was mentioned that the Prof was absent because he was in the Lakes where he was promising to do some hill intervals with beZ. Someone then wanted to know how often he would need a pee stop and whether his records would need adjusting for “micturition time.”

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

Perhaps celebrating a new job, Keel not only devoured one cake, but then went back for a second slice. His choice was warmly applauded by Taffy Steve who displayed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the calorific content of all cakes and confectionery, declaring anything with Bounty as an integral ingredient was likely to be up there with the best.

Meanwhile the venerable Toshi San is still looking to find a new club in the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. He rejected the last one as too effete when he learned they’d bought custom-mudguards in club colours and spent all their time posting photos on Faecesbookof their café stop tea and scones. I naturally couldn’t resist sending him a text with a photo of my cake and coffee, but being a total Luddite he couldn’t work out how to open the attachment.

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We discussed commuting and the fact that lights, more lights and brighter lights were good, but never seemed to be enough to protect you from inevitable SMIDSY incidents. I’ve been quietly impressed with a new Veglo Commuter X4 rear light I’ve got slung on my backpack, I think it principally works on a WTF basis as drivers slow down to try and work out what the hell it is they’re approaching. Meanwhile, Taffy Steve recommends a directional, helmet mounted light you can shine in drivers’ eyes to try and shake them from their myopic inattention.

I also put in a good word for slime filled inner tubes for commuting, I’ve stuffed a couple onto my ratbag MTB under some slicks and they’ve saved me from having to stop on at least 3 occasions this month as I criminally ignored perilously worn tyres. The only problem I found with these was one seeping wound on my front tyre that sprayed my overshoe with acid green slime before finally sealing, so my foot looked like it had been caught in an unpleasant snot explosion.

With Richard of Flanders out on his new Genesis winter bike, Taffy Steve was lamenting the absence of Crazy Legs as he wanted to see if he could infect a Genesis earworm on him. I somehow suspect Crazy Legs loathes Genesis however, so perhaps the outcome would have been an obscure, unrecognisable Genesis P. Orridge opus rather than a full-on Phil Collins whine. And there perhaps is the last time Throbbing Gristle and cycling will ever sit comfortably side-by-side in the same blog.

The Waffle:

As I slung a leg across the Peugeot I was peppered by a sudden burst of hail and assailed by here-we-go-again thoughts, only to be pleasantly surprised when the shower quickly passed. And that was pretty much it for the day, which would turn out to be bitterly cold, but crisp and dry and thankfully ice free.

Half way down the hill an exaggerated hissing usually reserved for the pantomime villain, announced a front puncture and I pulled off the road for repairs. Great start. Conscious of time ticking away, I got back under way and checked my options – press on quickly and hope I could make up lost time, modify my route, or head home and drive to the meeting point?

It had been a fairly slick (well, for me anyway) tyre change, so I decided to press on, but modify my route slightly and use a different bridge. This helped shave around 3 or 4 miles off my journey, but at the expense of bit of high speed traffic surfing along a stretch of dual carriageway.

Back on track and back on time, I started to clamber out the far side of the valley, noticing at this point that I was comfortable apart from the very end of my right index finger that was throbbing with the cold. Odd. Still, it looked like the long-sleeved base layer, thermal jersey, jacket, glove liners, gloves, bib tights, socks and overshoes was about right. Despite the first appearance of “good bikes” at the meeting point it’s still most definitely winter.

I uncharacteristically dropped behind Laurelan and Taffy Steve at the front as we pushed off from the meeting point, clipped in and rode out, chatting with the Red Max as we negotiated the Great North Road Cyclemaze.

We were just agreeing how hard winter had been on brake blocks, with stopping at times disconcertingly variable, when a car unexpectedly whipped around the roundabout toward us. Max nipped across in front of it to the accompaniment of squealing horn, while I got to test my recently recalibrated brakes to their full extent. So far so good – only the slight sideways slide had me at all worried.

With their stint done on the front, Laurelan and Taffy Steve swung over and Max and I slipped through as we took the road to the Cheese Farm. By tacit agreement we both upped the pace as we climbed Bell’s Hill reckoning there was too much chatter, giggling and downright enjoyment going on behind us. Did people really think we were out here for fun?

Over the top, Max rotated off the front and I took up the pace with Rab Dee and then Laurelan again. That worked well as when the call came up that the pace was too high I could immediately and unfairly blame her natural enthusiasm. It was around this time that Taffy Steve remarked that although there was a load of shiny, lightweight “good” bikes out today, they had all been noticeably absent from the front.

Looking back later I discovered that riding on the front with a forward pointing, imitation GoPro made for some very boring shots of empty roads, although I’ll readily admit that the alternative, a series of photos of cyclist’s arses isn’t all that much better. I’m working on trying to fix the camera to my saddle rails pointing backwards, then I should at least be guaranteed lots of shots of my club mates gurning and making obscene gestures behind my back.

At one point we ran up against a Closed Road sign, but OGL airily waved us through and informed us it wouldn’t be closed to us! The arrogance of cyclists, no wonder all the drivers hate us. Still this time he was right and we made it through without the embarrassment of having to turn back or indulge in a spot of impromptu cyclo-cross. We stopped briefly to split the group, with a larger than usual contingent of amblers escaping to take the direct route to the café.

The rest of us pressed on for a longer, harder, faster run that almost immediately split into two groups, with all the shiny summer bikes all pressed to the front and driving the pace.

It was here that I found myself clinging onto G-Dawgs rear wheel and being jeered by the grinning, demonic face that appears on his backside whenever the lack of oxygen makes me light-headed.

I swear he wears those evil-looking, gimlet-eyed, demon-possessed Castelli trews just to taunt me and has his ass-saver deliberately positioned to look like a giant tongue blowing me a massive raspberry as I slip despairingly off his wheel.

This definitely wasn’t the day for fighting it out and I was content to sit up and let a sprint I had no hope of contesting unwind in front of me.

On the return home I fell in with the BFG who was weaving desperately from side to side to avoid getting muddy splashes on his shiny new bike. Although he was suitably impressed that I had a fully trained cadre of ninja ghost-writers willing to take up the cudgel of sardonic club run commentary, he wanted to know where I’d been malingering last week.

I explained I was ill, but had submitted the required sick-note, signed and in triplicate. This then set him to musing about what it might say and he determined that general creeping decrepitude, aged enfeeblement and moral turpitude were the most likely causes for my absence. Sadly, I have a feeling he had the right of it.

He then revealed that last week he’d been blown out the back on the sharp climb up to Dinnington. Hmm, I wonder if it was just coincidence that he then went and dropped a couple of grand on a new shiny bike and has since eschewed all things vintage and elegant for brash, ultra-modern, ultra-light race tech?

I let him go to flex his old legs and new frame chasing down the Dawson twins as we entered the Mad Mile and they began their own private race for first use of the shower. Turning for home proved to be quite pleasant going with the novelty of not having to batter away into a headwind and the final few miles back were ticked off smoothly and without incident.

YTD Totals: 1,034 km /642 miles with 10,306 metres of climbing

Sturm und Drang … or Hail and Pace

Club Run, Saturday 13^th February, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 105 km/65 miles with 1,030 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 38 minutes

Average Speed: 22.6 km/h

Group size: 13 riders, no FNG’s

Temperature: 4°C

Weather in a word or two: Like riding through a slushie

Main topic of conversation at the start:

G-Dawg turned up replete with the bright blue oven gloves again, but having swapped out the carpet-felt muffler for knee-high hiking gaiters. I can’t decide if this is an inspired choice of winter accoutrements or just plain odd. Maybe if the gaiters had Castelli emblazoned across them I would be more accepting?

Crazy Legs wondered if the oven gloves were there so G-Dawg could help out in the kitchen at the café, but even professionally equipped, I didn’t think there was a hope in hell they’d let him anywhere near the bacon and egg pies as they emerged hot from the oven.

Unbelievably the weather mid-week had been so good that G-Dawg had felt the need to unleash his good bike and had temporarily hung up the winter fixie for the Wednesday run out. He managed to enjoy his freewheelin’ fun, despite an unadvisable tendency to try and slow down by simply adding a bit of pressure to the pedals. Where was that good weather now?

Crazy Legs told us a salutary tale of steppin’ out to see Joe Jackson in concert, deciding to miss the support act in favour of a pint or three, and then turning up to find Mr. Jackson already on stage and mid-song, halfway through his set as there had been no support act.

Crazy Legs therefore missed the iconic “Different for Girls” but I assume caught “Steppin’ Out” and “Is She Really Going Out with Him” – and sadly that’s just about where my limited knowledge of the Joe Jackson oeuvre ends, although I always coveted a pair of those cool, Cuban-heeled, side-laced pointy-toed Beatle boots that adorned one of his early albums. Maybe in a more utilitarian black not white though, after all I’m not a total fop.

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Anyway, Crazy Legs saw enough of the show to highly recommend it and I’ll be taking heed of his warnings not to arrive late for my hugely anticipated trip to see the mighty Shearwater in some pokey hole on the banks of the Tyne later this month.

Readying ourselves to ride out we held back as we noticed a late arriving cyclist carefully weaving his way through the traffic and street furniture toward us. “Who’s that?” someone asked.

“Craig?”

“No…”

“Josh?”

“No…”

“It’s that Scottish feller” Crazy Legs finally determined

“Yeah,” I agreed, “The one from Ireland.”

Oh hell, I guess they’re all Celts, aren’t they?

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

As we reached the café my lobster mitts finally succumbed to the weather and cold water began to seep through their linings. We decided that the holy grail for cyclists were fully waterproof gloves, which seem to be an impossible dream, although G-Dawg did suggest a pair of Marigolds. Of course we agreed these would need a little Sharpie branding to make them acceptable to cyclists, but someone got there before us …

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It amused me when I Googled “cycling Marigolds” and found a great picture by photographer Steve Fleming of one of our youngsters scaling Hardknott Pass during last years Fred Whitton Challenge, all the while sporting yellow gloves that the photographer purports are in fact Marigolds. I’m not wholly convinced they were, but must remember to ask.

Motor-doping was back on the agenda, along with how an engine could be so difficult to detect. I suggested the UCI set off an electro-magnetic pulse halfway up an Alpine climb, just to see who then keeled over as their motors died a sudden and brutal death. My Strava-enamoured companions were somewhat horrified by my blasphemous suggestion that someone might deliberately fritz their beloved Garmin’s.

Talk of advances in bike technology led to reminiscing about the past, when specialist winter clothing wasn’t readily available for cyclists. OGL recalled wearing old-fashioned motorcycle gauntlets with a big flared cuff, which we decided would also be suitable for a bit of on-bike falconry. Never mind motor-doping, if you could tether an Eagle Owl or Andean Condor to your bike think how many more watts you could generate? And how cool would you look in the process.

We then indulged in a wide-ranging conversation that wrapped around cycling books, old-style, rock-hard chamois leather inserts, saddle sores and the Laurent Fignon and Lance Armstrong books. OGL mentioned the traditional method of alleviating the pain of saddle sores was to cut a hole in your saddle, or ride with raw steak down your shorts.

We speculated that when Fignon lost the 1989 Tour to LeMond by an agonising 8 seconds he may have ridden the final and decisive time-trial with steak down his shorts to ease the suffering and unbearable pain from his saddle-sores.

In an “if only” moment, Son of G-Dawg suggested Fignon may have gained a small measure of consolation and revenge if he’d proffered the used steak to his victor as some sort of rare, ultra-exotic, specially prepared, luxury dish, which LeMond would unwittingly have consumed after it had been carefully tenderised by the Frenchman’s thudding backside, basted in saddle sore secretions and liberally marinated in butt sweat –a “filet fignon” if you will. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

In a discussion about under-age drinking, OGL claimed to be in the Percy Arms and playing on their darts team at the exact time Kennedy was shot. Personally I thought it was a bit suspicious that he went to such lengths just to establish an alibi.

We also learned that both Crazy Legs and G-Dawg are strangely discomfited by the sound of cotton wool tearing. I just don’t think I’m empathic and mature enough, or have the proper medical and psychological training to properly respond to such a heartfelt revelation and strange revulsion …

The Waffle:

Strava highlighted the ride temperature in blue once I’d finished, so I’m guessing it was officially cold out there by any measure and way beyond one of Carlton’s Cold Hand Days. Despite this I woke to find the curtains sharply silhouetted against an unexpected brightness from outside. Ever the pessimist my first thoughts were that I was either a target for an attempted alien abduction, or winter had returned with a vengeance and the light was bouncing off a deep, pristine layer of snow.

Thankfully I looked out to find the garden free of both extra-terrestrial lifeforms and snow and although the ground was wet there didn’t appear to be any frost or ice. Time to ride.

Even with the initial brightness it still looked cold, so I dressed accordingly, two long sleeved base layers, jersey and jacket, digging out the massive and ridiculous (but warm!) lobster mitts.

By the time I’d breakfasted and made it outside the initial brightness had been smothered by dark and threatening clouds. A quick check of the bike, a topping up of tyre pressures and I was dropping down the hill to the valley and straight into the teeth of a sharp, stinging hailstorm.

With the hail bouncing audibly off my helmet I stopped to pull my waterproof jacket over everything else and once on it never returned to my pocket for rest of the ride.

The shower passed to leave the air still and strangely hushed, seeming to carry and amplify the odd, random sound. There was the occasional whisk-whisk of tyre on mudguard, a ripping noise as I cut through random puddles and the low, ominous hum of power cables strung high over the road.

From somewhere unseen seagulls greeted me with a chorus of raucous shrieking. Did this mean the weather over the coast was particularly bad, or just that there were richer pickings to be had amongst the rubbish inland?

Thumbs and toes turned slowly numb and then, even more slowly, recovered as I warmed to the task and started to clamber out of the valley on the other side of the river. With time for a quick pee stop (cold and ancient bladders aren’t a great combination) I arrived at the meeting place with a handful of others, including OGL, slowly recovering from last week’s illness, but not quite there yet.

There were however a couple of noticeable absentees from the “Usual Suspects” who can be relied on to try riding regardless of the weather. I assume the Red Max had finally given up an unequal fight and decided to recuperate properly from his vicious illness, while the seagulls may have had the right of it and sensibly retreated from the coast where it looked like the weather was bad enough to keep Taffy Steve penned up.

It was a small group, a baker’s dozen if you will, who finally pushed off, clipped in and rode out, for once with no lasses present, although we did encounter both Mini Miss and Shouty at various points along our route.

I dropped to my usual position, hovering near the back where I started to chat to the “Scottish-Irish” feller. He’d begun riding with the club before I joined, but had been forced to stop because of family commitments (damn kids!) and had only just started again.

I was surprised to learn he’d actually been in the North East for over 8 years as we still hadn’t managed to knock the corners off his accent. While he could almost convincingly adopt the full Geordie, indignant-dolphin-squeak (well, far more convincingly than the Profs embarrassing Dick Van Dyke type stylings) –his underlying lyrical Irishness gave it a strangely odd and musical quality.

Being a feisty feller he began telling me a tale about confronting a speeding motorist, who’d ended up calling him a “Speccy, Scottish git.” Oh hell, I guess they are all Celts after all.

The blue flashing lights of a police car warned us of trouble ahead and we were forced to creep around a massive recovery vehicle squatting across two thirds of the road. Beside it sat the attendant police car and a battered and scraped silver pick-up truck that looked like it had been driven at high speed through a concrete pipe that was too narrow for its bulk.

I’ve no idea what actually happened, but couldn’t help feeling a degree of satisfaction that at least there was one less of these vehicles on the road. I know I shouldn’t stereotype all drivers based on their cars, but my only encounter with pick-ups has been when some homicidal, willfully careless, red-necked RIM has driven them directly at us too fast down too narrow lanes, with no intention of slowing and even a hint of accelerating toward us.

Having crested the first serious climb of the day we were halted by a puncture and instead of hanging around in the cold, the still-recovering OGL sensibly took this as an opportunity to strike out early and alone for the café.

While we waited for repairs to be effected the heads of state gathered to decide a new route in OGL’s absence. I had a brief chat with beZ to try and determine why he’d given up on the bright purple saddle that provided such a, err, startling contrast shall we say, to his pink bar tape. Apparently, although it might have looked “da bomb” it was too damn uncomfortable.

I idly speculated if anyone would ever come up with a heat mouldable saddle you could pop in the oven and then straddle when still hot to form it to your own unique contours. Alternatively, I guess you could just stick a sirloin down your shorts…

We pressed on as the weather began to get a little nasty and the roads a whole lot filthier. Son of G-Dawg pointed out the coating of snow and ice lurking in the grass at the road verges, as we discussed whether we should adopt the athletics ruling on false starts and apply this to punctures – we leave you behind on the second one, even if you were in no way involved in the first.

Almost in direct response the call came up that there had indeed been another puncture and we pulled over to wait before finally deciding to split the group. beZ and Aether went back to help out with the repairs and the remaining nine pressed on.

In horrible sleet and frozen rain we scaled the Trench, negotiated the dip and clamber through Hartburn and suffered the drag and grind from Angerton to Bolam Lake. From here speed started to build as the café beckoned, with Captain Black in fine form and continually driving us along from the front.

At the last corner three consecutive fast commutes in a row and the exertions of the day took their toll and I drifted off the back to finir sur la jante and in need of a quick caffeine fix.

Despite being royally beasted in the café sprint, when we hit the climb out of Ogle on the return home, my contrary legs felt suddenly transformed and I floated up it effortlessly.

We were then blasted by a sudden and harsh blizzard of wet stinging snow that lashed down, striking exposed skin like a hundred tiny micro-injections of novocaine which stung and then almost instantly turned flesh numb. With the likelihood of the weather worsening I decided to turn for home early and cut off a few miles by looping over, rather than under the airport.

Now I was able to ride at a good pace as if my legs had settled on a steady and comfortable rhythm. I found myself clipping along at a surprising 17-18mph even as the road started to tilt upwards, my momentum only occasionally interrupted when I slowed to wipe occluded lenses clear of the wet, clinging snow.

I took the long, hated grind up past the golf course in the big ring, and kept the pace high right until the descent down to the river. For some reason this winter has been especially hard on brake blocks and here I found braking that had been fine in the morning when I set out had become decidedly sketchy in the cold and wet.

Having trouble scrubbing off speed quickly, I eased gingerly downhill, pulling hard on the brakes all the way, despite the icy flood that welled from my waterlogged gloves every time I squeezed the levers.

Swinging across the river I pushed along until the next hill beckoned where progress was slightly interrupted. I’m usually quite content with the thumb operated shifters on my old Sora groupset, but the combination of cold, wet and numb fingers coupled with bulky lobster mitts meant I couldn’t drop down onto the inner ring without stopping and using my right hand to forcibly click the lever down.

With this task finally, if not smoothly accomplished, I scrabbled quickly up, away from the river and swung left for the last few miles home.

Considering I was carrying what felt like an extra 6 or 7 kilo in my waterlogged socks, gloves and jacket, the climb up the Heinous Hill was relatively accomplished. As I ground up the last but steepest ramp another punishing hail shower swept in, pinging off my helmet with a sound like frozen peas being poured into an empty pan.

Stung into action by the hail, I watched the white streak of one of our cats shoot across the neighbour’s front lawn at high speed before launching himself headfirst through the cat flap and disappearing with a loud clatter.

Shelter seemed like a sensible idea and I swiftly followed, temporarily abandoning the Peugeot in favour of a hot shower with bike drying and cleaning set for some indeterminable future when the weather improved.

YTD Totals: 861 km /535 miles with 8,519 metres of climbing

Hell Among the Yearlings

Club Run, Saturday 6^th February, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 102 km/63 miles with 813 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 28 minutes

Average Speed: 23.0 km/h

Group size: 34 riders, no FNG’s

Temperature: 6°C

Weather in a word or two: Filthy

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Taffy Steve was the first to bring up “motorised doping” with his wry comments that just when athletics was being seen as the bad boy of international sports, cycling somehow found a way to shoot itself in the foot and re-claim the low ground. Again.

OGL rightly pointed out that the worst fallout from Femke Van den Driessche “borrowing a friends bike” (complete with in-built motor) for only the single most important race of her season, was it detracted from a very worthy winner.

So, in my own small and meaningless way to try and redress the balance, congratulations to Britain’s new Women’s U23 World Cyclo-cross Champion, Evie Richards who won with style and panache by riding away from all the older, more established competitors in dreadful conditions on a wind blasted, rain lashed course. And she’s only 18. And it was her first ever continental race. Impressive.

Crazy Legs decided that Taffy Steve deserved the acronym MIR following his Most Improved Rider award. He also made it clear that any likeness to a large, obsolete piece of Russian space junk, prone to a decaying orbit and likely to burn up in the atmosphere was purely intentional.

Somewhat predictably, this set him off on a tribute to Billy Bragg and a quick rendition of New England. It’s wrong to wish on space hardware, but I think Taffy Steve somewhat wished he’d never become embroiled in the conversation.

Apparently the Cycling Weekly reporter never made it to the café and his rendezvous with OGL last week, but will be returning at a later date for a full-on feature on the club.

We’ve been warned that only those in official club jersey’s will be allowed to partake in the accompanying photo-shoot. What effect massed ranks of our lurid, club jersey might have is hard to tell, but I’m predicting a sudden outbreak of subconjunctival haemorrhaging amongst the unsuspecting readership of Cycling Weekly.

Captain Black suggested the photo-shoot might provoke a Songs of Praise phenomena, when usually draughty, empty churches suddenly see congregations swell alarmingly as soon as the TV cameras show up to a service. There was even some speculation about a black market in illicit club jersey’s developing, perhaps signalling the first time this venerable piece of club kit has ever been even remotely desirable.

Footnote:

Not content with motor doping (allegedly) we have since learned that Van den Driessche’s father and brother (already a convicted bike doper) are facing criminal charges for trying to steal parakeets from a pet store.

In any sense of the word you want to take, I suggest it’s now fair to refer to the entire Van den Driessche family as “budgie smugglers” and treat them with all the opprobium and revulsion you would typically reserve for being confronted by a pale, wobbling, moob-endowed, hirsute man in too-tight Speedo’s. You know the sort, we’ve all seen them.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

OGL stopped by to inform us that new club skinsuits were now available for our Racing Snakes. I don’t want to prejudge, but I hope they’re a more sympathetic design than the current club jerseys, or I might be getting that “budgie smuggler” nausea all over again.

He also told us to be careful on the way back as a local Tri-Club were running a time trial down Berwick Hill. We convinced ourselves that the only way we would do this in weather like todays would be to have a hot tub at the finish. We reasoned that getting into the tub could even be used for transition practice, but then realised the idea would probably fail as once in the tub no one would be coming out in a hurry.

Again motorised doping reared its ugly head and Son of G-Dawg had perhaps the best idea, fitting pullback motors to cyclo-cross bikes, specifically for their “cavalry charge” starts. I can see it now, a long line of 50 or so riders dragging their bikes backward to wind up the spring, before being unleashed to race toward the nearest course bottle-neck. High speed carnage almost guaranteed.

Crazy Legs revealed a life-long ambition to be bundled into a mail pouch and snatched up by a speeding express train, apparently just for the buzz of that initial retina-threatening acceleration.

Perhaps this dare-devilry is purely genetic as he then told us of accompanying his 75 year old mother to an avant-garde installation in the BALTIC, where following a series of screens led them to the brink of a 12 foot high, stainless steel slide. Not only was his mother thoroughly undaunted by the slide, but demanded another go.

The Waffle:

A dry if chill start to the day promised good riding and I dropped into the valley to find that the winds weren’t anywhere as bad as the storm-whipped, westerly gales of the past few weeks and had swung completely around to blow upriver just for a change.

Without a debilitating wind to battle, I was early and the only one at the meeting point when OGL swung by in civvies, loaded down with a very large, shiny club trophy, which had apparently been donated by David Millar. I started to politely and modestly decline it, as I couldn’t see how I could possibly ride while burdened with a large piece of what footballers always, unimaginatively and predictably refer to as “silverware.”

OGL patiently explained that the trophy wasn’t for me and he was taking it to the Club’s Go-Ride event to present to Daniel Dixon, our best young rider. Well done Daniel, I didn’t touch it. Honest.

OGL also explained he wasn’t riding this week as he was full of cold. While Our Glorious Leader was crying off, this was the first Saturday in the month, so all our more advanced youngsters were out in force.

Their number included the Monkey Butler Boy, accompanied by the Red Max who was suffering from a particularly vicious bout of the lurgy, but had somehow managed to drag himself out despite being “as sick as a parrot” – another hoary old football cliché that seemingly fits alongside (dare I say dove-tails with?) a worryingly recurring avian theme this week.

With OGL being absent G-Dawg and Crazy Legs put their heads together, intent on devising a route that would be somewhat different from the usual. After a few minutes they offered a couple of alternatives, but were immediately shouted down – nobody wanted to think and have to make a choice. We didn’t want options, we just wanted to ride!

Point made they set out and 32 lads and lasses pushed off, clipped in and followed, not really sure of where we were going and not really caring too much either.

Loitering at the back I caught up with Andeven, recently returned from summer at the bottom of the world and finding acclimatising back to British winter a trifle depressing. I also discovered Rab Dee lurking here, out on a new winter bike for his first ride of the year and also finding the cold less than agreeable.

For a short while, on one of our less frequented routes, we sped down a narrow path bordering the A1: a cracked surface, rucked with tree roots and strewn with debris, but infinitely preferable to jousting with the thundering HGV’s on the main road.

Somewhat surprisingly, we survived without puncture or mishap, exiting onto a private road, where still in single-file a long line of us streamed through a quiet village.

I watched in amusement as a woman on the far side of the road picked up one of her small, yappy and obviously semiprecious, dog and clutched it to her chest protectively. She rather warily watched us go by with fear filled eyes that might, perhaps, be a suitable reaction to a horde of wild Cossacks intent on pillage, but seemed misplaced for a meandering line of mild-mannered, grinning and gurning cyclists. Maybe they don’t get many visitors from “the outside”

Freezing rain had started to liberally pepper us and we were losing order along with riders as they stopped to pull on waterproof jackets. Well, all apart from Shoeless who with seeming insouciance retrieved his rain jacket from a back pocket, shook it out, slipped it on and deftly managed to zip it up despite the massive winter gloves limiting his dexterity – all the while driving the pace at the front of the bunch.

We decided to stop under a road bridge to regroup and let everyone get sorted, before pushing out into what had now become a steady, icy downpour. I later learned that Keel had bizarrely decided the forecast was good enough to break his good bike out of hibernation and had obviously offended the cycling gods, who now punished us with earlier and heavier than forecast rain.

I was braced for the steep climb of the Mur de Mitford, always a challenge and especially when the road is slick, but we by-passed this particular nasty and dragged ourselves up through the village of Mitford itself. From there we worked our way to Dyke Neuk and another quick stop for the Racing Snakes and braver amongst us split for the longer, harder, faster, Self-flagellation Ride™.

Our reduced group pressed on with thoughts of coffee and cake fuelling our pace, though we prudently scrubbed off the speed for the increasingly sketchy drop down the dip and then sharp clamber up to Hartburn.

Again we regrouped to allow stragglers to catch on, before sweeping down through Milestone Woods, and hitting the first rollers. Taffy Steve led the charge for home with a hopeless attack dedicated to the absent Red Max, but faded as the road ramped up.

I swung past on the back of a long line, but couldn’t hold the pace and the gap widened. A few riders nipped past, including Kipper, but he started to slow as the next gradient bit. I swung to the outside and started to ease past him, just as he swung right to avoid several potholes in the road and our bars became entangled like two ancient, rutting stags locking horns.

With a frantic bit of wrestling and a whole heap of wobbling, we finally managed to pull apart, but the momentum directed me laterally over the white line, right across the road and into the thick mud in the opposite gutter. Needless to say the driver of the fast approaching, sharply braking car was mightily unimpressed as I was swept across the road in front of him.

With wheels churning and spinning in thick mud, I clung to the very edge of the road to let the car slip past, waving sheepishly in embarrassed apology to the driver. Kipper apologised for not having seen me, but it was just one of those things that can happen and no harm was done, although the adrenaline spike to the heart wasn’t particularly pleasant.

Clearing the café, the Prof took some of the others back by a longer route, but the weather wasn’t conducive to an extended ride, so most of us took the usual way home.

Somewhere along the way, I have a vague recollection of the Red Max drifting off the back in a case of illness induced enfeeblement. I’m guessing he should really have been home recuperating, instead of battering himself to try and contain our more enthusiastic youngsters and suffering through his own private hell among the yearlings.

Still, not all bad as I’m guessing the Monkey Butler Boy revelled in dropping his Pa – hey, a victory is a victory and you can only beat the competition that turns up on the day.

On splitting from the group I was relieved to find that, for once I wasn’t faced with punishing headwinds on my push for home and the miles were duly ticked off with no great trials or traumas.

YTD Totals: 533 km /331 miles with 5,207 metres of climbing

The Teacake Haiku (Destry Rides Again)

Club Run, Saturday 23^rd January, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 102 km/63 miles with 968 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 36 minutes

Average Speed: 22.0 km/h

Group size: 34 riders, 1 FNG

Temperature: 10°C

Weather in a word or two: Typically Tropical?

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Along with the latest FNG, I found myself being hugely entertained by one of Taffy Steve’s inspired rants at the meeting point. The target for his ire this time around was bike manufacturers who inflict narrow, hard and excruciatingly uncomfortable saddles on the uneducated, new bikers – who then accept them simply because they look “racy” – despite perching on them being akin to straddling the thin edge of a 2×4 piece of timber.

He concluded by suggesting that if the FNG was looking for more comfort he should perhaps look for a Specialized saddle as, “they’ve had years of experience catering to fat-ass Americans.”

It was at this point that Crazy Legs spun up and declared the weather was Typically Tropical©- self-inflicting his own savage ear-worm and instantly banishing the more credible, post-punk tune he’d earlier embedded into his brainbox.

As he vigorously hummed “Whoa, we’re going to Barbados” and waved his arms around with some exaggerated (and less than convincing) reggae-styling, he caught a whiff of his own gloves and recoiled in horror at their rancid staleness.

Part in shock, part in amazement he had a Spinal Tap moment and asked everyone to “smell the glove.” When I politely declined he tried to balance on one leg and lift his foot into my face, inviting me to sniff his boots instead.

This then reminded him of the bizarre time Dave Le Taxi innocently asked if anyone else’s cycling shoes ever smelled of cat’s pee. The rather obvious response – apart from the sea of uncomprehending and blank looks – “Oh, so have you got a cat then, Dave?”

I learned the club annual dinner and awards event had gone down a storm and Taffy Steve had won the accolade of “Most Improved Rider”. There was some discussion about whether he should have this engraved on his frame and if there was an accompanying jersey for the year ahead followed by some coloured bands for cuff and collar that could be worn in perpetuity.

I’m sure that solely to avoid disappointing my expectations, OGL then reminded everyone that club fees were now due.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

One of the waitresses approached our table and enquired if anyone had ordered the teacake. One of our number somehow misheard this simple request and thought she’d asked if anyone had ordered a haiku. Unfortunately, we were all too leg weary and brain battered to come up with a suitable, short Japanese ode to teacakes.

We decided that the indomitable, indestructible G-Dawg was our own version of Jens “Shut Up Legs!” Voigt. It was suggested that he didn’t suffer road rash when he fell off, but the tarmac wore the signs of G-Dawg rash for weeks afterwards.

With all the other family combos in the club, you could trace a trajectory to when the still improving, maturing son would supplant the ageing, slowing father. We saw it happen with beZ and the Prof, and for all the Red Max’s denials, evil machinations, deceptions and manipulations I think he’s just delaying the inevitable day when the Monkey Butler Boy regularly whups his ass.

You wonder though if Son of G-Dawg will ever face a day when he doesn’t have to fight tooth, nail and claw to get one over on his Pa. I likened this to Prince Charles’s attitude to the Queen, desperate for her to abdicate so he could take over before falling into useless senility (as opposed to his current state of useless cogency).

Not of course that G-Dawg in anyway resembles “Her Madgeness” (despite similar hairstyles) … nor does Son of G-Dawg remind me of Prince Charles for that matter.

Goose related discovering a posh, custom-build bike shop on a recent trip to London and with a few minutes to spare did that thing that all cyclists do, went to sate his more voyeuristic instincts on some suitably over-priced, but shiny, shiny bike porn.

He found the door to said establishment firmly barred however and had to wait for someone to unlock and unbolt it before he was allowed to even peek over the threshold. Interrogated as to precisely what he wanted, he lamely mumbled something about, “Just wanting to look around.” This was met with stony silence and a mighty frown, until things became so uncomfortable that he was discouraged from investigating further and fled the scene.

He rather satisfyingly reported that he’d since heard the shop had closed. Doesn’t sound like a great loss to me.

As we were finishing up, beZ returned along with other members Demon Cult of the Racing Snakes to report that they’d been delayed when the Cow Ranger somehow destroyed his front mech with what turned out to be a less than simple gear change.

This opened up a whole new discussion about completely contrasting riding styles and how some are sympathetic and perhaps empathetic to their bikes mechanical limitations, while others take a, shall we say, more direct and agricultural approach. Interesting.

Finally, in a fit of overwhelming juvenility we decided “arse hat” was a suitably disparaging, underutilised profanity that deserves greater recognition. We even had cause to test it out on several brain-dead drivers on the return home.

The Waffle:

For three whole weeks, twenty-one entire days I’ve been out of action with a bad chest infection which had filled my lungs to overflowing with a claggy, slightly radioactive and luminous industrial gunge and left me with all the aerobic capacity of an asthmatic gerbil.

Recovery has to start somewhere however, and working on the principle that riding a bike is … well, like riding a bike, something you don’t forget, I embarked on two straight days of light testing, commuting en vélo.

Having just about survived this, I tentatively set off for the rough and tumble of a first club run in what seemed an absolute age, not sure how well I’d manage, but certain it was going to hurt. Destry rides again?

Mother Nature had continued to roll around in my enforced absence, so at least it was near daylight as I checked over the bike one last time and pushed off for the meeting point.

For a winters day it was also surprisingly mild, so no chance of any ice and the forecast was for it to remain dry throughout. Sounded like too good an opportunity to miss.

It was still early enough for the roads to be relatively quiet, although the peacefulness was brutally shattered at one point by a van with a slipping fan belt that managed to sound like a barrel of cats being drowned in scalding water.

Despite this audible assault, I made it to the rendezvous point with plenty of time to spare and in not too bad a shape. There I found Taffy Steve complaining he was over heating in just a Gore winter jacket and short sleeved base layer and threatening to confine the jacket to the back of his wardrobe until at least October next year.

juliana — G-Dawg again asserts his authority over Son of G-Dawg (second from the left)

I was far from being alone in deciding the weather was too good an opportunity to miss and a large pack of 34 lads and lasses were soon clustered along the pavement. By some bizarre coincidence an appreciable number of us had turned up in matching red jackets, so that it appeared as if the Red Max was fielding a full team of personal domestiques.

As we pushed off, clipped in and set out I noticed that, rather tellingly, and in contrast to the “red wedge”, only 3 riders in this large group were wearing the official (and officially lurid) club jersey that nobody likes, but we seem stuck with.

I drifted to the back of the group where I had a long chat with the Prof, who predictably wanted a wee stop minutes after we set out. How refreshing to learn that nothing had changed in my absence.

I found going along the flat to be generally fine, but was struggling on the hills and panting like a crazed, over-excited phone pest as I tried to force air into less than optimal lungs. Stepping up off the pedals and climbing in a bigger than usual gear seemed marginally less demanding aerobically, but I knew the likely trade-off was more quickly sapping whatever leg strength I still possessed.

We finally stopped to allow the Prof some much needed relief and split the group. I slowly and quietly edged toward the amblers, intent on taking the slightly more direct route to the café, but I wasn’t sneaky enough and was spotted and called out.

I tried to look suitably ill and enfeebled, even throwing in a dramatic hacking cough as I pointed weakly at my chest and gasped loudly, but it wasn’t going to wash. Taffy Steve however promised I wouldn’t be left too far behind and since it would obviously be churlish to spurn an offer of assistance from the clubs most improved rider, I shuffled back into line, hoping I wouldn’t regret the decision too much.

The next split saw us lose the Demon Cult of the Racing Snakes as they switched into full self-flagellation mode. When Zardoz then took an impromptu left (later claiming voices in his head made him do it) I gladly followed him and half a dozen others to make the longer, harder, faster ride slightly shorter, slower and easier by cutting out the ascent of Middleton Bank.

With Taffy Steve as point man, lead out, wheel to follow, wind foil and general protector, we skilfully negotiated a small hunt and their horses, road surfaces cratered like a lunar landscape and several huge pools of water as I clung onto his back wheel.

gas mask — Desperate measures are called for to combat burning clutches

I managed to stay in touch as the pace wound up and we dropped through Milestone Woods to crest the rollers, before dropping back on the final long drag uphill, completely oblivious to any sprint that may have been going on in the distance ahead of me.

I arrived at the café to find it mobbed with other cyclists and the general public, or as they’re more commonly referred to, normal people.

Luckily it was just about warm enough to get away with sitting outside as long as we huddled together and eked out our body warmth, so half a dozen of us decamped to the garden

As I wrestled with my tray in the wind outside, I noticed that someone had thoughtfully placed a large section of discarded mudguard on one of the benches, obviously in the expectation that whoever it belonged to might return to claim it.

A nice gesture, but I felt sure that with mudguards being so inexpensive it would be far easier and much more effective to just go out and buy a complete new set, rather than try to jury rig something using cast off pieces.

One benefit of sitting outside was that we didn’t have the struggle of leaving the warm sanctuary of the café, and with no incentive to hang around we finished our mandatory refills quite briskly and set out for home before the others.

I rode at the front with Taffy Steve and we seemed to be clipping along at a fairly reasonable pace, despite a growing headwind. As we approached his turn for home, I remarked how surprised I was that the other group hadn’t caught and passed us, waved him away and pressed on.

I’d gone no more than a few pedal strokes into the Mad Mile, when G-Dawg and Son of G-Dawg whipped past as they wound up their personal race for home and first use of a hot shower. All the other riders from the café then whistled past, including zeB, who, no doubt under explicit instructions from the Prof, now carried the discarded piece of mudguard from the café precariously balanced across his handlebars.

I couldn’t help but laugh, only the Prof would want to reclaim such a cast-off bit of kit, with no doubt grand plans to turn it into some semi-functional, eccentric, Heath Robinson, gimcrack something-or-other in his secret laboratory/workshop/lair.

As the last few riders passed, I dropped my own pace feeling my legs were now totally and completely empty and as I made the turn for home the last dozen miles were starting to look like a real challenge.

The drag into a headwind, up past the golf course proved a real grind, but things eased after that. I don’t think I’ve ever climbed the Heinous Hill quite so slowly (in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever climbed any hill quite so slowly)

My assault on its lower slopes definitely wasn’t helped by having to breathe through the acrid, all pervasive, lingering and uniquely rank stench of some arse hat driver burning up his clutch, but I somehow survived and made it home.

how_to_walk_like_john_wayne — … or alternatively, just cycle for 3 days in a row after a long absence

Hopefully the ensuing sore throat doesn’t mark the re-emergence of the illness, but is just a consequence of having to forcefully drag rasping, cold air down into malfunctioning lungs.

After 3 weeks of enforced inactivity I expected the difficulty breathing, the tired, heavy legs and all the associated hurt. I wasn’t however prepared for how quickly my posterior had become sensitised and how much it would object to having to perch for long periods on a saddle again.

In recovery, I don’t much resemble Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again, but I have developed the buttock clenched, stiff-kneed, bow-legged and awkward gait of a Shootist-era John Wayne.

Right, I’m off to google Specialized saddles.

The Teacake Haiku

To ride pale winter light

Promises a rich reward, then

Hot, toasted teacake.

YTD Totals: 252 km /157 miles with 2016 metres of climbing

Braking Bad

Club Run, Saturday 2^nd January, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 110 km/68 miles with 528 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 41 minutes

Average Speed: 23.4 km/h

Group size: 14 riders, no FNG’s

Temperature: 8°C

Weather in a word or two: Cold and wet

Main topic of conversation at the start:

OGL emerged from the gloom of the car park having heroically struggled through to us to cry off with what he was claiming was a severe bout of man flu (# cough # hangover).

He stayed long enough to remind us that club fees are now due and warn us of both an impending hurricane and the sudden appearance of mutant ice. This ice has allegedly adapted and is now capable of spontaneously forming at temperatures up to and including 5°C.

Taffy Steve appeared with twin, syncopated disco strobes illuminating the dark underbelly of the clouds, an attempt perhaps to induce fits and seizures in random passing motorists?

We had to persuade him to turn at least one of the lights off before we could even bear to look at him. Despite being all lit up like the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree and using lights with the intensity of a Blitz searchlight, he still reported a few too many SMIDSY* encounters with the traffic.

I’m pretty certain this isn’t going to be the last edict issued to remind us that club fees are now due –the massive £10 a year seems a paltry amount for 52 weeks of fun and frivolity, but apparently there are a large proportion of club members who begrudge paying even this token amount.

*SMIDSY – Sorry mate, I didn’t see you

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

With our regular haunt closed for the day, we had to make the annual pilgrimage to our alternative café. This was prominently adorned with notices warning of local encounters with the Bolam Lake beast, a monster depicted on the posters as a rather large, mature Silverback gorilla.

Everyone looked at the picture, then at the Taffy Steve, and then back to the picture, and he was forced to admit that he had indeed been seen around the Bolam Lake area, funnily enough almost a year ago to the day.

We were unable to ascertain if this coincided with the last sighting of “The Beast” or whether it has ever been spotted sitting smartly astride a velocipede.

The Red Max pointed to one of the white children’s high chairs and giggled that at least Plumose Pappus would have somewhere to sit if he decided to join us.

Half way through my coffee the BFG and Crazy Legs finally joined us after the purgatory of puncture repair duty. G-Dawg remarked how the BFG’s face was so dirty he looked like he’d just completed a 10 hour shift down a coal mine. BFG complained his “tyres were really filthy…”

“So you rubbed them clean on your face?” G-Dawg asked, not unreasonably.

The BFG again drew attention to his fallible eye-sight which he’d amply demonstrated on several previous occasions (see “The Texas Chainring Massacre and the Road to Cheescake”, Club Run, 31^st October 2015) by failing to identify brown sugar cubes and asking Crazy Legs if he always put dry roasted peanuts in his coffee.

Crazy Legs bemoaned not having the services of Taffy Steve’s mighty frame pump and having to use the molto piccolo, Blackburn Airstick. At this point Carlton dipped into his backpack, pulled out something and started flipping down hinges, tightening ratchets, pulling out telescopic extensions and uncoiling a long rubber hose as he revealed a semi-compact track pump.

“That’s not a real pump” he drawled, “This is a real pump”

We couldn’t help but happily reminisce about the time Szell suffered an explosive puncture and, by all accounts bent the barrel of his frame pump into a perfect right angle trying to force air into the newly repaired tyre through a stuck valve.

As we were leaving the café the Prof declared that it was, “impossible for lobsters to pick up worms.” An insight that left me with a very strange mental image and knowledge I’m sure I’ll be eternally grateful for…

The Waffle:

Following last week’s stunning sunrise and bright skies, this week I rolled out to low, leaden cloud, a curtain of rain and what seemed like perpetual twilight. These crepuscular conditions never brightened much throughout the entire day and encouraged everyone to keep their lights burning for the duration of the ride.

It was still mild though and despite OGL’s direst warnings there wasn’t the merest trace of ice to worry about.

In an attempt to combat the incessant rain and at least try and stay dry, I topped my winter jersey with a light waterproof jacket, hoping the outer layer would keep me dry, while the inner one would help control my temperature and wick moisture away from my base layer.

This seemed to work well and I finished the ride comfortably dry apart from a noticeable damp patch on my forearms. The rest of me wasn’t so lucky, and everything else, tights, socks, overshoes, shoes, gloves and helmet were thoroughly soaked through and waterlogged.

As an added benefit the outer jacket took the brunt of the huge volumes of mud, dirt, debris, disintegrating plant life, general crud and who knows what else that sprayed up from the roads and was relatively easy to sponge clean afterwards.

There was plenty of true grit in evidence … punishment comes one way or another

Around 14 lads and lasses pushed off, clipped in and rode out, but our numbers really were a moveable feast as late-comers tagged on while others dropped away or took alternative routes. We even had a rare appearance from Dave Le Taxi, getting his annual club ride over and done with early this year, although you’d have to say he could have chosen a better day.

The wet and filthy roads conspired to coat everything in a layer of grit that got everywhere. And I mean everywhere – halfway through the ride I could bite down and feel it grinding between my teeth, and when I tried to delicately re-arrange my helmet hair in the café, my scalp got an unexpected exfoliation which would probably have cost a small fortune in some upscale beauty spa.

The grit also served to turn brake blocks into whetstones. You could hear – and almost visualise rims being viciously ground away whenever we had to slow and braking was so seriously impaired that stopping quickly became a bit of a lottery.

Having put off replacing my brake blocks for one week too long, I became intimately acquainted with the inner workings of my brake levers which gaped open to an alarming degree every time I needed to stop, hauling down so hard the ends of the levers were in danger of smacking off the bars.

If I had it bad, others had it worse. The Prof started to hang about 100 yards off the back of the group so he had plenty of time to stop. Only a portion of this can be attributed to his ancient reflexes and less than nimble reactions, so the impaired braking we were all suffering must have played a part.

Dave Le Taxi bemoaned the cantilever brakes on his winter bike, which he said were a continual source of frustration and bad stopping power, while Carlton was castigating himself that he hadn’t chosen to ride his disk-brake equipped bike.

At one point dropping into Stamfordham village he swept serenely inside me and through a junction in a long, graceful glide, only to admit he was scared witless, had tried to stop and couldn’t.

When we called a quick halt, beZ discovered part of his problem was that he’d lost half of one of his brake pads somewhere along the way. We naturally sent him to retrace his steps and try and find it.

not a knife — That’s not a ~~knife~~ pump, this is a ~~knife~~ pump

None of us had managed to sink quite as low as, the perhaps thankfully absent, Moose Bumps however, who not only regularly rides without bar tape, bar end plugs or adequate cold weather clothing, but was discovered a few weeks ago to have worn his pads down to the metal.

As well as the potential danger, I would have thought this produces a deeply disconcerting audible assault and probably sparks when he hauls the anchors on and must be tearing through his wheel rims at an alarming rate. I can’t help feel he’s taking the poor student shtick a bit too far and perhaps the need for club brakes we mooted last week is more urgent than we thought.

With no OGL to bark at everyone, Crazy Legs invented a surrogate OGL, the “Proxy Peter”. This proved far too cultured, with proxy messages being passed from the rear up to the front of the group to politely request a change of pace. I must admit I missed the creative over-use of the f-word in the UCI approved ratio of 2:1 – two eff’s, effing’s or effer’s to accompany every other word (including any additional swearing required).

Knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist, I asked Crazy Legs if we should: “Pass the proxy ‘pon de left-hand side?” instantly inflicting a vicious ear-worm on him and eliciting a startling tribute to Musical Youth through the medium of song. For the second time in as many weeks this earned me a (surely unwarranted), “Bastard!” epithet.

Somewhere along the way we lost Shouty and Plumose Pappus, but picked up the Cow Ranger. He wasn’t aware our usual café was closed, so we were able to save him from whining and scratching futilely at its door and scaring the owners with his deranged howling.

BFG kindly highlighted all the potholes, mainly by planting his front wheel squarely into them. It took longer than I expected, but he eventually managed to puncture, just as we were gathering pace for the run to the café. Crazy Legs stopped to help him and they soon had the matter in hand and waved the rest of us on.

The Red Max celebrated the New Year with his first Forlorn Hope attack of 2016, but this died as we turned away from the usual café route and climbed the rollers in reverse. Shoeless and Son of G-Dawg led the charge upwards, and along with G-Dawg I just about managed to hang onto the wheels.

50a2657256864cea631c31e0586604eb — It really wasn’t the day for the BFG’s white jacket

There was a bit of a scramble to wring out and dump wet gear on the radiators in the café, which might have turned a bit competitive until we discovered the radiators weren’t actually on.

With no way to meaningfully dry or warm up all the sodden outer layers, we just had to grin and bear it, pulling on wet gear for the ride home. Well, all except for Max who smugly pulled a spare jacket and dry gloves from his ever expanding backpack.

On the way back the Red Max and Taffy Steve took an alternative route to avoid the climb of Berwick Hill, then Dave Le Taxi dropped off the pace. I was going to ride back with him as he too lives south of the river, but he was soon completely out of sight and it was too cold and miserable to hang around.

I suspect he was more than happy to make his way homeward at his own pace anyway. Alternatively he might have learned a hard lesson and dropped completely out of sight before calling for motorised assistance.

As we approached Berwick Hill, Carlton too dropped off the pace, still concerned by his lack of braking and more comfortable on his own. Shoeless and the Cow Ranger stepped up the pace on the front and tucking in I reached my turn off in seemingly no time at all and began to work my way down to the river and home.

So, brand new year, same shit weather – 2016 here we go…

YTD Totals: 110 km /68 miles with 528 metres of climbing

Sur La Jante

The Chronicles, Confessions and Idle Musings of a Club Cyclist

Tag: club run

Two Up, Two Down

Mea Culpa

Bertie Bassett’s Northern Exposure

Monumental Impediments

Black Mirror

An Epiphany on the Road to Dinnington

Sturm und Drang … or Hail and Pace

Hell Among the Yearlings

The Teacake Haiku (Destry Rides Again)

Braking Bad