The Driller Killer

Club Run, Saturday 7^th May, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 121 km / 75 miles with 1,1094 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 42 minutes

Average Speed: 25.6 km/h

Group size: 32 riders, 1 FNG

Temperature: 14°C

Weather in a word or two: Overcast, dry

Main topics of conversation at the start:

Crazy Legs arrived astride his much beloved and cosseted Ribble – a sign more reassuring than even a pinky-promise from 100 of the world’s leading climatologists and weather forecasters that there was absolutely zero chance of any precipitation on our ride today. (He would however be caught getting off and carrying his bike gingerly around the few puddles that still lingered in the shadier parts of the lanes.)

He’d just returned from a brief sojourn on the south coast of Spain, declaring the trip absolutely fabulous and the cycling fantastic, but claimed the big, big mountain climbs (3,000 metres plus) in the Sierra Nevada had utterly destroyed him. He said it was an awful, dreadful, hateful, horrible, anguishing and humbling experience … and he couldn’t wait to go back.

He then turned his ire on the public poll to name the new, £200 million British Antarctic Survey ship where the people’s choice, “Boaty MacBoatface” handily won the online vote with over 124,000 supporters.

In this instance however the “voice of the people” had been inexplicably ignored and the ship has been named after Sir David Attenborough. In protest Crazy Legs declared his beloved and cosseted Ribble would now be known as Bikey MacBikeface. No doubt he’ll be lending his support to the petition which has just started to persuade David Attenborough to change his name to Boaty MacBoatface in recompense.

Taffy Steve was pleased to note that for the first time in weeks the “hard core of utter idiots” who’d ridden right the way through the winter with him, G-Dawg, Son of G-Dawg, Crazy Legs, The Red Max and me were re-united. If possible his grin spread even wider when he was reminded OGL was away on the club training camp in Majorca and we’d once again be off the leash.

G-Dawg had just formulated and gained consensus for a proposed route on some less travelled roads when Szell appeared, shaking off his winter torpor for a first club run of 2016. This is quite early for him actually, it’s still May and he’s only missed a quarter of the year.

His sudden and unexpected appearance gave us pause as ideally we needed a route that included Middleton Bank so we could practice our Szell Game – drop him on the climb, re-group over the top, then wait and wait and wait until he’d just … nearly … almost … made it back and then accelerate smartly away. Small? Petty? Childish? Yes, yes, yes, but great fun nonetheless.

As it was we decided to stick to the original plan which would take us in a big, clockwise loop around the Ryals to climb up past the radio mast at Beukley Farm before some demon descending down the A68, a sharp right turn and then more climbing to get us back up to a road that would eventually lead to the café.

Hopefully G-Dawg wouldn’t need his inner ring, although I’ve been led to understand it’s no longer in pristine, like-new condition after last week when, contrary to my earlier understanding, it was actually used in anger for the first time.

I’m only comfortable writing this as I have sworn affidavits from two independent witnesses who saw G-Dawg climbing on the inner ring last week, although I have yet to confirm rumours that he paid someone else to actually make the shift for him so his hands could remain unsullied.

Main topics of conversation at the coffee stop:

We had pushed two tables together and it seemed to attract cyclists like a magnet pulls in iron filings as we attempted to see just how many chairs we could squeeze around it. We were soon sitting pressed together almost two deep, the table surface all but invisible under a mound of cups and cakes and plates and trays and cutlery and helmets.

Crazy Legs, channelling the inner maturity and sophisticated wit that makes him a (self-proclaimed) Cards Against Humanity demon, nodded across at another group in the far corner where Goose, Captain Black and a one or two others were spread out and luxuriating in a wide empty table and acres of space and explained their relative isolation by declaring, “That’s the stinky table.”

The noise of our incessant chattering, punctuated by giggling and guffaws drew the ire of other café patrons, in particular an elderly couple sitting adjacent, the woman wearing the kind of expression usually reserved for someone being forced to wash down mouthfuls of sauerkraut with long draughts of apple cider vinegar. I had to resist the urge to lean across and tell her it could be worse, she could be sitting next to the stinky table.

And then we actually managed to make it worse after all as one of the girls kicked a tray she’d leaned up and out of the way. It slid down the wall with a prolonged, rattling, rumbling scrape and then cracked down onto the floor with a noise like a pistol shot. Oops.

I now suggested “Duchess Suck-Lemon” actually needed to suck on a lemon to improve her disposition and help her face un-pucker just by the tiniest of margins. Sadly, my observation prompted a rambling discourse from Crazy Legs about all the lemon groves he’d recently ridden through on his Spanish venture, where apparently all the lemons looked so perfect that he began to think they were artificial.

On stopping near one plantation he’d found a lemon on the ground and had opened it up just to check it was natural, only to start wondering if maybe the fallen lemon was a plant to convince gullible tourists that all the others were real. I can only attribute this level of paranoia to to the high altitude, oxygen deprivation and the sensory overload from exposure to warm sunshine following a winter of unmitigated bleakness in northern England.

He then foolishly told me he’d started watching fantastic Scandi-TV thriller, The Bridge and received both barrels of my enthusiastic acclaim for all the odd European TV shows that tend to appear without any great fanfare on BBC4 or E4 – The Killing, Borgen, Spiral, The Returned, Deutschland 83, The Cordon, Blue Eyes et al.

At one point I caught up with the Prof who’d dropped off the back of the group when his rear wheel started to disastrously unravel. We thought we’d seen the last of him and he would be calling for a taxi home, but his running repairs had been successful and he’d made it to the café.

He started to give me a long and very convoluted description of exactly what had gone wrong, something about axles and cones, bearings, cassettes, freewheels and quick release skewers, retaining nuts, tolerances and not having tightened everything up sufficiently. “Ah,” I suggested simply trying to cut through the all technical obfuscation, “You bodged it.”

Crazy Legs and G-Dawg had been out riding with the Wednesday Crazy Gang and they had revealed Szell used to ride with them back in the day and his nickname then was “The Driller.” Perfect.

The Waffle:

Saturday turned out to be somewhat disappointingly cold after what had been a very pleasant week, with decent weather and prolonged sunshine. Still, while the sky was a monotonous and uniform shade of dingy grey and there was no chance of even a sliver of direct sunlight, it was dry and relatively calm. Good enough.

I found it still chilly enough for light, long-fingered gloves, but my legs did get their first airing of the year and I was able to show off my new, very, very shiny, very, very plasticky and very, very red Chinese shoes.

En route to the meeting point I was stopped at a level crossing to let a train rumble slowly past, but caught the lights on the bridge just right to skip across on the tail of the rest of the traffic. Swings and roundabouts – or lights and crossings?

A brief stop to irrigate some foliage found me rolling up to the meeting point with G-Dawg and Son, where we eventually numbered just over 30 lads and lasses, including a healthy contingent of our kids who always take to the roads on the first Saturday of every month.

We agreed to G-Dawg’s hastily improvised but unerringly good route, pushed off, clipped in and rode out. I found myself alongside Szell who told me he hadn’t been out for an age as he was currently playing in two covers bands and was finding it difficult to find any free time between (and I quote) “the music, the hoes and the blow.” I assume he was being ironic, but you just never know.

He was keen to know where we were going to and whether a slower group was likely to form, already planning for a quick escape. He then knowingly asked if we would be taking in his own personal bete noire, Middleton Bank – just so we could enjoy his suffering, suggesting he possessed a degree of self-awareness that I would never have attributed him with.

As we passed through one sleepy little village, Szell proclaimed how much he liked Genghis Khan’s quote about the greatest happiness being, “to scatter your enemy and drive him before you. To see his cities reduced to ashes. To see those who love him shrouded and in tears. And to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.”

“You don’t mess with Genghis Kahn!” he opined, loud enough for Crazy Legs to overhear and bark with delight, before commenting that you can find the strangest conversations buried in the heart of the bunch.

Szell drifted backwards after a few hills and I found myself riding along beside Taffy Steve, until we all had to single out and navigate around a large, very wide and very yellow bus. The driver stopped to let us through and called out something like, “Whey aye! gann on man, canny lad, a’ll keep yez al warkin!”

NOVATEK CAMERA — “Whey aye! gann on man, canny lad, a’ll keep yez al warkin!” – or something like that anyway

“Nice of him to stop, but I haven’t got a clue what he was saying.” Taffy Steve said as we regrouped and pressed on, chatting about the irrepressible Mario Cipollini and his ever so slightly inflated ego.

We started to climb on a road that wound up into the hills and turned into a somewhat rough, single lane farm track, becoming strung out in a long line as we crept slowly up toward a summit dominated by a massive radio tower. The surface was in a poor state and there was lots of pointing and an increasing number of hazard call-outs:

“Pots”

“Pots!”

“Gravel”

“Mud”

“Shite”

“Pots!”

Sneaky Pete suggested the Belgians might have the cobbled classics, the Italians Strada Bianca, but we were the only ones to get Strada Merda!

We then passed a pothole so deep that G-Dawg suggested that if you fell in you would have to ride around the bottom, like a wall of death to build up enough speed to attain an escape velocity and get out the other side.

We were soon crawling past the radio mast and up to the junction with the A68 before stopping to regroup. We now had a fantastic, long and fast drop off the top, then a sharp right turn and more climbing to replace the altitude we’d just thrown away so carelessly.

Yet more climbing led us to a new junction where we again regrouped with some of the youngsters and Szell hurting and well off the back. It was here that we heard about the Prof’s wheel disintegrating, but the word came up not to wait and just press on.

The Red Max said he would take the youngsters off on a shorter route to the café while everyone else continued. Szell, perhaps sensing an end to his needless suffering decided to tag along too and then Sneaky Pete sneaked away with the group as well. What the sadistic Max had failed to mention however was his chosen, shorter route actually included an ascent of the rather fearsome Ryals. Oh dear.

We continued with yet more climbing until we finally reached roads I began to recognise and the pace started to creep up. Soon there was a split and a compact bunch of us were driving toward the café at high speed, buzzing like a swarm of angry bees on the rampage.

As the road levelled and straightened, Son of G-Dawg surged around everyone and opened up a clear gap. I rounded G-Dawg and pulled everyone along for a while, then Captain Black powered through and carried everyone past me in turn, so I slotted back into the end of the line. Son of G-Dawg had sat up by now, job done as Captain Black swept past and into the Snake Bends.

We flew over the junction and set out straight up the main road, my least favoured option, keeping the pace incredibly high. Once more I latched onto G-Dawgs rear wheel and let him drag me to the café.

I’m beginning to think G-Dawg’s rear wheel as my ultimate safety blanket, but he must be sick seeing me there every time he turns round – like having an unwelcome stalker always two steps behind you everywhere you go. I must ween myself off this and find some other target for my now very well perfected wheel-sucking chicanery.

On the way home I had time to chat with Captain Black and we laid tentative plans to tackle the new, 90 mile Cyclone route. Sneaky Pete and Taffy Steve had also suggested it was their favoured option, so we should be able to pull a small group together for it.

We also had a chat about the Giro and the surprise performance of ex-Ski jumper Primož Roglič. We wondered how he descended and whether we’d see him stand up on the pedals and lean forward with his hands clasped behind his back. I seem to remember some tale of Bernard Hinault experimenting with a bizarre Superman descending pose, but this could be even more spectacular.

I also had words with Carlton who noticed how relatively calm and ordered the ride had been, even without the strident exclamations of the absent OGL and we had a brief chat about whether the club needed to start thinking about succession planning for when the old feller finally hangs up his cleats.

As regular readers may know, OGL is our de facto Road Captain, Club President, Vice-President, Treasurer, Chairman, Secretary, Event Organiser, Social and Welfare Officer, Patron, Club Committee, Route Finder, Web Controller, Archivist, Photographer, Social Media Gatekeeper, Weatherman, Chief Recruiter and Club Ambassador, so it’s not a case of simply nominating the next man up.

As the group split and I entered the Mad Mile I passed Szell, sitting in the middle of the group and still plugging gamely away having survived a rather torrid first run of the year. I waved him off with a cheery “Next week?” and then pressed on for home.

A long, lumpy ride, but a great run and the weather is finally starting to turn good. Things are looking up.

YTD Totals: 2,567 km / 1,595 miles with 24,253 metres of climbing

I Luv the Valley OH!

Club Run, Saturday 30^th April, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 116 km / 72 miles with 1,044 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 37 minutes

Average Speed: 25.0 km/h

Group size: 24 riders, 0 FNG’s

Temperature: 14°C

Weather in a word or two: Bright, bit chilly

Main topic of conversation at the start:

The BFG was sporting new and very, very shiny shoes and could be seen occasionally pausing to admire his own smile reflected in their supreme shininess. He ventured some tale about finagling a free tooth-whitening session as part of the process for having dental veneers fitted and I suggested he’d missed a trick and could have taken colour co-ordination to a new level, if only he’d matched his teeth to his wooden rims.

Although forgoing rim-coloured teeth, he had invested a small fortune on just the right colour of new socks, reasoning that nothing in his old wardrobe could quite do the extreme shininess of his new shoes justice.

Taffy Steve unzipped his saddle bag to reveal everything within was individually wrapped in little plastic bags, carefully labelled and incredibly neatly organized. I felt he’d possibly missed his vocation organising handbags for socialites, or maybe stashes for drug lords. He explained that everything needed individual wrapping because his saddle bag wasn’t weatherproof. The BFG suggested copious amounts of silicone sealant on the zip would perhaps make it watertight, if less than functional.

The Prof disappeared around the corner and we speculated he’d spotted more castoff treasure he was now swooping in to claim. “Just watch,” the BFG instructed, “He’ll come back shaking the piss off some old abandoned glove or something.” He returned empty handed however and I don’t know who was the more disappointed, him or us.

G-Dawg surmised that OGL was very unlikely to show as he’d last been seen early on Friday evening be-kilted, supine and already ever so slightly inebriated, during one of the many events in the month long wedding celebrations to honour the King of the Grogs.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

The BFG revealed that, in the days long before he determined hair was debilitatingly un-aerodynamic and decided to stop using it, he’d been a 6’6” Goth with hugely spiky hair, commonly referred to as “The Krogan.”

The hairstyle had been achieved using hazardous chemicals on an industrial scale, including a dangerously combustible mix of several tins of hairspray, super-strength hair wax, red hot crimping irons and prolonged backcombing with a garden rake.

He suggested that using these techniques he’d been able to achieve a Sideshow Bob barnet of unsurpassed magnificence, but one that any stray spark might have turned into a towering inferno. “Like Michael Jackson” he prompted, but all I could visualise was a wellhead fire.

Brewster joined us at the table with a dire tale of how his friend had snapped the steerer tube on his Scott Speedster bike while trying to climb up Heinous Hill. The story was illustrated with photos of the well trashed bike, the rider narrowly avoiding being run over by the following car and managing to escape with only superficial injuries. Luckily the accident hadn’t happened going downhill at great speed – a sobering thought and one that suggests it’s best not to ignore bike recall warnings.

[NB: Scott voluntarily recalled about 8,000 2014 Speedster road bikes worldwide “due to a finding that the steerer tube in the front fork could break, creating a possible fall hazard,” according to a statement issued by the company. Judging from Brewster’s story it would seem the danger is very real.]

We determined that bikes made of graphene and carbon nanotubes were the future, but would requiring chaining up at all times when unattended, in case they blew away.

The Prof sidled up to the table to invite the BFG to join some of them on a longer ride home. The BFG instantly agreed, but then lined up with the rest of us for the normal route back. He was perhaps mindful of a hugely enjoyable ride he’d taken earlier in the week, returning home smiling and full of joie de vivre, only to be confronted by a scowling Mrs. BFG standing arms-crossed, coat buttoned up and foot tapping furiously. Being late for a family appointment = serious buzzkill.

The Waffle:

I was almost ready to leave early Saturday morning when a quick and frantic search finally revealed my phone still in my jacket pocket from Friday’s commute and with a battery as flat as a flounder. Wanting to carry it in case of any emergencies, I decided to modify my route and delay the departure long enough to trickle a little life back into it. It had managed to suck up a charge of around 20% by the time I decided it was time to leave – it would have to do.

My revised route cut around 3 or 4 miles off my journey at the expense of a short distance travelling along a dual carriageway. This is usually quiet enough early in the morning, but I guess it only takes one idiot. This time that was exemplified by a racing hatchback that screamed past me, much too close and much too fast, before undertaking and cutting dangerously in front of another car. A nice little adrenaline spike to start the day. Perfect.

Perhaps the jolt helped me scramble up the other side quicker than usual, as the next time I looked at my Garmin it was 8:52 and I’d done 8:52 miles and was closing in on the meeting point. I was one of the earliest to arrive and along with Aveline and the BFG I was able to sit sheltered from the wind and soak up some welcome, warming sun.

With no OGL we left the route up to G-Dawg who quickly gathered consensus for a too rare trip down into the Tyne Valley – quiet roads, a picturesque route, great descents, but of course some serious climbing to get out again.

The only other obstacle was the riverside road that had been undercut and washed out by some recent flooding, but we were assured there was still a narrow path traversable by bike and as an added bonus it was now completely closed to cars.

24 lads and lasses pushed off, clipped in and managed to instantly annoy a bus driver before we’d even cleared the meeting point. He wasn’t prepared to wait for us all to pass, so in an act either born of pure ignorance or simple malice, he pulled out into the middle of our throng, muscling his lumbering double-decker in between us. This left the front of the group squashed up waiting by the traffic lights while the rest were caught behind, being intensely fumigated by the diesel belching out the back of the bus. It seems we have a rare talent for annoying drivers just by occupying a bit of public highway.

Finally, out onto the open roads, fresh air and into a cold wind, we found it was still quite chilly, especially when the sun was occasionally shrouded by high racing clouds which felt like someone leaving the door open in an Arctic weather station. Shut the bloody door!

At some point I rode with Taffy Steve and we spent some time reminiscing about all things 2000AD: Rogue Trooper, Ace Garp and Strontium Dog et al. Judge Dredd and the League of Fatties seemed to be a particular high point for him.

He then regaled me with the observations about the increasingly shrill exclamations of Geordie women and contrasted this with the surprisingly low, rumbling, bone vibrating timbre of their Scouse counterparts.

We were soon dropping into the Tyne Valley, the road a long sinuous curve of smooth tarmac that encouraged you to build and maintain speed all the way down. A few were bending low and tucking in, but dropping into their slipstream I had no trouble keeping up with minimal effort and without any extreme body contortions.

A long line of us carved our way down the hill and through the first of the sleepy villages dotted along the river bank. Just before we hit the washed out section of road a pee stop was called and a couple of the girls pushed on down the hill to try and find a “ladies room.”

A few minutes later a rather ashen-faced mountain biker hauled himself past us. “Are those two girls with you lot?” he enquired. I answered in the affirmative, and he shook his head and declared rather unsteadily, “Err, they’re done with whatever they were doing!”

Then he pedalled stolidly past trying to retain some modicum of dignity. “There,” beZ wryly noted, “Is a man who doesn’t live with women.”

The washed out section of the river road was indeed passable, although a little muddy in places and just as advertised, completely free of cars.

Once clear we rolled through a massive Gymkhana, marvelling at the vast array of expensive 4×4’s parked up in a field, each one with its own horsebox. They’re not shy of a bob or two around here. Some kids were having their own event in a separate field and I was astonished at just how round some of the ponies were, like barrels with little legs.

“Aren’t they all incredibly fat?” one of the girls asked, I agreed, suggesting it must be how they were bred. “I didn’t mean the horses!” she countered. Meow.

We clambered up a few hills to reach the junction of the road we could take down into Corbridge and waited for a few backmarkers. A quick headcount determined that Another Engine was still adrift and as we waited dark murmurings about the approaching climb began to circulate, along with worrying and frankly blasphemous rumours that G-Dawg might need to use the inner ring.

Sneaky Pete sneaked back down the road to see if he could locate Another Engine, leaving G-Dawg to wonder who he should send out next if Sneaky Pete didn’t return. Just as he was about to select a new sacrificial lamb though, both riders hauled themselves into view.

We seemed to snake back and through and around Corbridge, caught in its labyrinthine one-way system for an age, before it spat us out onto Aydon Road, apparently a 4^th Category Strava Climb: 1.6km at an average gradient of 6%. It wasn’t as bad as forecast, G-Dawg’s inner ring remained blissfully untroubled and we were soon regrouping and heading back onto familiar roads.

I used the climb out of Matfen to skip from the back to the front of the group. As we turned off for the Quarry Climb we were all strung out and it was decided we’d press on, but regroup at the top of the climb.

Having crested the Quarry, I pulled over with G-Dawg and Son, but no one else seemed bothered and the BFG set off on a push for the café. I belatedly gave chase, leaving the G-Dawg Collective to handicap themselves even further, before they instigated a two-up team time trial in pursuit of everyone else.

With a sizeable gap to make up I dived downhill after the front-runners, braking late and hard for a junction and sweeping round on the wrong side of the road when the “Clear” call went up. I managed to tag onto the back of the group and then work my way slowly forward.

The smell of coffee must have been in the air as the BFG pushed hard and a gap opened. Taffy Steve pulled me across leaving everyone else behind as we thundered along.

I was now hanging onto the coat tails of two big, powerful units, capable of laying down huge watts and both much faster than me in straight line speed. They also made great wind blocks though and I started surfing the wheels, kicking the pedals hard around 3 or 4 times then freewheeling for a bit in an attempt to conserve energy.

With the BFG skittering all over the road like Ilnur Zakarin contesting a sprint, Taffy Steve started to get nervous and tried nudging ahead. The BFG though seemed to take this as a personal affront and responded. My acceleration to close coincided with the road starting to rise up slightly. I jumped past the two, kicking out of the saddle to attack up the slope and drive up and over the top.

I opened up a small advantage before the BFG closed me down and passed me with the admonishment, “You cheeky beggar, you can’t do that!” But I had – and I’d managed to shake Taffy Steve loose as well. Now there were just the two of us, at high speed, wheels skipping and skittering on the rough surface, rattling and thrumming, my whole body braced and shaking as the pace increased again.

The road dipped a little and the BFG smashed it, stomping hard on the pedals to try and pull away. I was now out of gears and out of breath, with no hope of any freewheeling, fixated on the wheel in front. Slowly the elastic began to stretch and the gap between our wheels grew even as I slid onto the drops and tucked my head down. The gap became a couple of feet as the road slowly levelled and then the faintest of rises took the edge of the BFG’s speed and I clawed back up to him.

The road dipped again and the BFG buried himself in one last massive effort and then sat up slightly to look over his right shoulder to see nothing but empty road. He seemed to hesitate slightly and then slowly looked over his left shoulder to find me sitting there grinning up at him like some malevolent gnome.

“Oh!” he sounded somewhat surprised, “You’re still there.” And then the fight seemed to leave him, he laughed, swore loudly and eased. His speed dropped and I shamelessly and cruelly mugged him, sliding past to open up clear air long before we hit the Snake Bends. A marvellous piece of devilish wheel-sucking skulduggery that only a low-down snake like Simon Gerrans could possibly approve of.

I crossed the junction to ride up the carpet-bombed country lane in splendid isolation, while everyone seemed to take the shorter faster main route. I still made the café just behind the front group spearheaded by the charging G-Dawg tag team.

On the way back there was just time for Taffy Steve and I to ponder if Crazy Legs and The Red Max would make a suitable “Odd Couple” – I had Max pegged as Oscar Madison and Crazy Legs as the neat freak Felix Unger, but then I thought about all of Taffy Steve’s little ordered baggies in his saddle bag…

For some reason we then decided that Castelli should adopt a more accurate sizing guide based on Lord of the Rings characters, so no longer would you need to order XXXL if you wanted a medium jersey, you would just order an Aragorn. Racing Snakes would need a Legolas, while for those with a fuller figure a Gimli would be required. We both agreed we knew one or two Treebeard’s as well as some “tricksy little hobbitses.”

Our hugely intellectual cogitations were rudely interrupted by a small, ancient hatchback that came beetling along the narrow lane. The RIM obviously thought he was driving a massive, road-hogging Hummer and braked to a stop in the middle of the road, obviously befuddled that we hadn’t immediately pulled over to doff our caps and allow him passage.

As I rode past grinning hugely, the Alpha male driver made one of those furious WTF gestures and I couldn’t resist giving him a very cheery wave back. Somewhat incensed he punched his hand down hard onto the horn and the car emitted a very belated, weak, completely innocuous and comical little, “Parp, parp!” OMG – I nearly rode into Noddy!

I was still chuckling over that many miles later as I dragged myself back up the hill and safely home.

YTD Totals: 2,406 km / 1,495 miles with 22,603 metres of climbing

Wellie Tops and Collie Wobbles

Club Run, Saturday 23^rd April, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 113 km / 70 miles with 1,063 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 24 minutes

Average Speed: 25.6 km/h

Group size: 34 riders, 3 FNG’s

Temperature: 13°C

Weather in a word or two: Beautifully bright, bitterly cold

Main topic of conversation at the start:

With a degree of mild, but surely misplaced approbation, OGL called out several riders he’d spotted out riding mid-week, as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have and were standing accused of getting in “unauthorised” secret miles.

The Prof once again rolled up on the Frankenbike, eliciting gasps of disbelief from those who hadn’t seen his progression from small-wheeled velocipede to a grown up bike last week. He gave me a special hug, ostensibly because I was well dressed and co-ordinated (Bertie Bassett rides again) -although I suspect the real reason was that Crazy Legs was late arriving and I was simply the nearest target for his latent, but still patently simmering homo-eroticism.

Crazy Legs did finally turn up and commended the group for a fine showing of club jerseys. A sotto voce commentary from Son of G-Dawg suggested that the 6 on show were about 75% of the total number who would wear the club jersey with any kind of regularity. I’m not sure whether or not he was double-counting G-Dawg who was actually wearing two – an official club gilet over a Grogs unofficial one.

OGL then took several of youngsters and no few elder statesmen to task for wearing shorts, declaring it was still much too cold for exposed knee joints. Many suggested they had packed away winter clothing for the year in boxes, in under bed stores, the loft or in old steamer trunks and it was too much hassle to revert now. It was also suggested that not everyone had the luxury of living in OGL manse, where entire rooms, if not complete wings are devoted to his vast collection of readily accessible and seasonally themed bicycling apparel.

OGL mentioned Shane Sutton’s dismissal of Jess Varnish (and I think I’m only paraphrasing slightly here) as having a fat ass and needing to go away and produce babies. G-Dawg was unimpressed, but reasoned you shouldn’t expect much else if you’re foolish enough to promote an Australian to a position of power and authority.

Main topics of conversation at the coffee stop:

At the counter I happened to hear an FNG asking the girls whether he should be getting a mug or a cup of coffee and had to intervene for the sake of decency. We are men, we drink from manly mugs.

As he’d defected from another club and embraced his dark side I was curious to find out how we compared us to his previous band of brothers. As expected his former club took the novel approach of splitting into many different rides according to ability and publishing all the routes well before the day.

This had the advantage of allowing people to plan things in advance, but at the obvious expense of surprise and novelty, or as Andeven explained, the joy of looking up to find you’re suddenly in Rothbury, 40 miles from home and expected back for an important family engagement in the next half an hour.

I asked the Pinarello riding FNG, Dogmatix what bike he had before, interested to know just how much of an upgrade the uber-bike was and how it actually compared to a more affordable option. He said he’d ridden a Carrera previously. Well, that was a conversational dead-end then.

Dogmatix then revealed that when he’d stopped to tighten his seat post last week someone had pointed out a washer on the ground that he’d reasoned wasn’t from his bike, but had picked up and slipped into his pocket just in case.

This morning he’d found that it was an essential part for holding together his multi-tool. He’s now gone from being the proud owner of a convenient, quality multi-tool to having two bits of steel case and a loose collection of jangling allen keys and screwdriver bits in his pockets.

Ride Profile

The Waffle:

A dry day, bright and sunny – if bitterly cold and infinitely preferable to the past few Saturdays dreich and bleak showing (they rhyme by the way, if you’re wondering how to pronounce dreich :))

A rare confluence of decent weather, work load and family commitments had allowed me to commute into work 4 times during the week. These journeys had warned that the mornings were still very chilly, but there was at least a possibility that things would warm up enough to be pleasant later.

My commutes had been good rides, other than a strong headwind all the way home on Monday and the fact that on Thursday morning I’d wrapped my bike lock around my frame, but completely missed the bike rack.

Luckily Campus Security spotted my dunderheaded idiocy and slapped on one of their own locks to secure the bike. I’d then been somewhat taken aback to hear the ratbag mountain bike described as “expensive” when I went to get the lock removed. Then again, maybe it just looks good in comparison to some of the bikes our students use.

There was a big group of us at the meeting point on Saturday, including a few faces I’d not seen for months including Famous Sean’s an irregular will-o-the-wisp who occasionally graces us with his presence. This was perhaps the first indication that the long months of cycling hibernation is at last coming to an end, although one swallow doesn’t make a decent drink as the parched sailor said. As a counterbalance there were a few noticeable absences amongst the regulars, with The Red Max away on holiday and Taffy Steve strangely and silently AWOL.

As we started out I found myself riding alongside the Prof who enquired if I’d ever had any issues with the Frankenbike’s bottom bracket. The loud and disturbing creaking from “down there” persuaded me not to hang around in case it ultimately disintegrated and a quick rotation brought me up alongside Richard of Flanders.

He was celebrating as he’d inadvertently found and secured a rare Strava KOM while riding a tatty hybrid to school to pick up the kids. This gave me the idea of hauling my bike over next doors front gate and riding up their drive to see if I can secure an unassailable Strava KOM of my own. I think it could even earn me a Charly Gaul-like nickname, how about “L’Ange de Allées” or “The Angel of the Driveways.”

Yet another rotation found me alongside Son of G-Dawg and I complimented him on a perfectly aero bike, deep section carbon wheels, and skin-tight jersey, but had to ask what had gone wrong with the sloppy, baggy socks that negated all his marginal aero-gains and resembled saggy welly tops that had been set to flutter in the wind like twin drogue parachutes.

Apparently he’d forgotten to do the weekly laundry and scratting around in the back of his drawers to try and find anything suitable to wear, the socks were the best he could come up with. He admitted he’d also tried in extremis to dry his jersey by hanging it in the back of the car on the drive over, but it was still unpleasantly damp around the edges. He was obviously hoping it didn’t rain otherwise he’d start foaming and secreting a trail of soap suds behind him.

Not to be outdone, one of the youngsters in front was wearing hideous, putrid green socks decorated with big bloodshot eyeballs that seemed to be staring right at me. I guess the good old days when the only socks you could wear would be white and you’d be pulled from the start line of a race for any wardrobe transgressions are sadly no more.

I overheard Crazy Legs discussing Captain Scarlet and suggesting he drove an SPV or “Special Patrol Vehicle” and had to jump in to correct him – as we all know Captain Scarlet actually drove a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle (c’mon kids, keep up). I think this exchange just convinced Richard of Flanders that all cyclists are at heart deeply weird nerds.

At one point OGL drifted aimlessly back through the group, seemingly just to disrupt everyone. A few minutes later he was sprinting back up to the front, going round a blind corner on the wrong side of the road. Son of G-Dawg called out that there was a fast approaching car, but OGL blithely waved off the warning before swooping inside. Son of G-Dawg growled that he didn’t care if OGL tried to ride over the onrushing car – but he was worried by the sudden swoop back across the road that had everyone scrabbling for brakes.

With the club organised Sloan Trophy set for Sunday, OGL was intent on reconnoitring the route as a final check that everything was in good shape for the next day’s racing. This led us down the Quarry Climb, where a whimpering, vacillating BFG was so eager to escape the longer, harder, faster group that he felt compelled to dive recklessly away in pursuit of the amblers, brushing incredibly close to G-Dawg, if not in fact physically jostling him as he passed.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for Crazy Legs to prove his maturity by shouting, “Feck off you big feck” or something equally as erudite and witty, but sadly he’d already turned off for the café with a bad case of un jour sans.

Ahead, at the junction we saw the amblers turning left while our longer, harder, faster group went right. I joined G-Dawg on the front pushing into a vicious headwind as we ground our way toward the top of the Ryals – this was perhaps going to be the only day when riding down them was almost as hard as climbing up.

Just before the top Mad Colin called a halt as, for the second time in as many outings, Dogmatix found his seatpost slipping. Bloody cheap Pinarello’s. We waited, but people began to get impatient and started to slip away in ones and twos to stream down the descent.

I held back a little longer, then as things seemed sorted pushed over the brow and began to accelerate downward. I moved onto the drops and tucked in, quickly building up speed as gravity sucked us down and hitting a max of 67.7kmph according to my Garmin, despite the headwind.

Halfway down I saw G-Dawg wrestling manfully with his bike, his whole body rigid and shaking and his wheels oscillating savagely as he tried to ship speed and remain in control. I couldn’t tell if his deep-section wheels had caught a sudden crosswind or he’d developed an uncontrollable speed wobble – either way I gave him as much room as possible, sweeping right across the roadway to slide past.

Somehow an ashen G-Dawg managed to complete the descent, but couldn’t be persuaded to climb back up and try again. We regrouped as we swung right onto a narrow farm track and started to climb up again, where we caught and merged with the riders who’d slipped off the front. More climbing and then a bit more followed, before the road finally levelled and we pushed on at high speed for the run in to the café.

I was sitting behind Laurelan as the pace increased and saw she was slowly starting to detach from the riders in front. I cut inside and clung onto G-Dawgs rear wheel as he and Moscas wound the pace up further. With the road starting to dip down a small group managed to open up a gap and we pulled slowly away.

Son of G-Dawg jumped, but I was at terminal velocity and couldn’t have come around G-Dawg to chase if I’d wanted to. Moscas then slowly faded and dropped away and just when it looked like Son of G-Dawg’s break was decisive, Captain Black thundered past to challenge and they raced each other down and into the Snake Bends.

Crossing the main road, we dropped into single file to slalom around the potholes that made the lane look like a recently bombed lunar surface. There was then just the chance for one last burst up the sharp rise to the junction and we were done and rolling through to the café.

On the way home I dropped in beside Captain Black for a chat and to try to discover the secret of his hugely rampaging form; was it drugs, clean living, motor doping, or perhaps three Shredded Wheat for breakfast?

He said it was nothing exotic, just hard work in the gym and, as his temporary gym membership is due to run out soon, he suggested he’ll soon be returning to join me amongst the ranks of the also-rans. Damn, I was hoping for an easy to follow short-cut to good form, but there’s no chance in hell you’ll get me into a gym.

I completed my trip home in good time and without incident to find anniversary greetings from WordPress in my email. I was somewhat surprised to learn I’ve been plugging away at this blog thing for a full year. Tempus fugit?

So, I guess now’s a good time to thank anyone who’s managed to stumble upon this benighted backwater of the Internet, has put up with my verbose, inane ramblings, actually “liked” the odd post or two, added erudite comments, or even bravely signed up as a follower.

One year, 64 posts, 4,711 hits, 1,943 visitors and counting. It’s all quite humbling. Thank you.

YTD Totals: 2,250 km / 1,398 miles with 21,081 metres of climbing

Transitions, Transmissions and Tales of the Tashkent Terror

Club Run, Saturday 16^th April, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 101 km / 63 miles with 973 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 16 minutes

Average Speed: 23.7 km/h

Group size: 14 riders, 2 FNG’s

Temperature: 8°C

Weather in a word or two: Sleet, snow, sun, showers, wind and hail

Main topics of conversation at the start:

I informed Crazy Legs that, completely out of character, OGL had actually been at the meeting point when I rolled up bang on 9.00 o’clock.

“So, finally kicked you out has she?” Crazy Legs enquired, but apparently this wasn’t the case. OGL then began a long, rolling ramble to relate the entirety of his morning conversation with Mrs. OGL in all its infinite detail. Eyes quickly glazing over, Crazy Legs suggested there was a kind of sublime, zen-like perfection in one word answers and innocently enquired if OGL agreed.

The local, Tour of the Reservoir starts today, which I guess explains the truly shitty weather. I actually think it’s stipulated in the rule book that the race will be cancelled if it’s not at least lashing down with rain and blowing a gale, or if the temperature ever dares nudge toward double figures.

This video by Darrell Varley(complete with obligatory hailstones on the grass!) gives an idea of just how bleak the racing was this Saturday. A few of our mob were planning a trip to watch the finish of the race tomorrow, when hopefully the things will have improved (although it’s hard to see how they could get any worse.)

An FNG joined us astride a very nice, brand new, Dura Ace equipped Pinarello Dogma with deep section carbon wheels. He said he was a Sky employee and had won the bike in a competition. Nice work if you can get it.

OGL conducted a quick smuguard count, only 4 out of 14, but one of these included the Pinarello and we all agreed this was just wrong on so many levels it didn’t count. There was a definite feeling that fitting guards to a Dogma was like harnessing a thoroughbred to the plough.

In a complete revolution and startling transition the Prof had temporarily eschewed his small-wheeled velocipede for the Frankenbike. This had been freshly resurrected (yet again) in his secret lair/laboratory/workshop and transformed with a coat of light absorbing, matt black paint. The only splash of colour was provided by one single, bright red brake cable outer (he’d obviously been unable to beg, borrow, find or steal sufficient black cabling) and a large, candy pink rubber band holding his Garmin onto some kind of gimcrack mount fabricated out of who knows what.

There was naturally a great deal of surprise, if not shock by this transformation, although OGL’s suggestion that it could perhaps herald the emergence of a beautiful swan seemed a bit wide of the mark: you know the saying, if it looks like an ugly duck, waddles like an ugly duck and quacks like an ugly duck, then in all probability you know exactly what it’s going to be?

Main topics of conversation at the coffee stop:

OGL mentioned Dan McLay’s incredible slalom-style sprint to win the Gran Prix de Denain (here) where he surfed effortlessly through gaps that didn’t seem to exist before bursting over the line with perfect timing – equal parts luck, indomitable bravery and unbelievable skill.

Crazy Legs was reminded of the photo that showed the perfect inverted V of Nacer Bouhani and Michael Matthews leaning their bikes over at incredible angle during their top speed clash amongst the barriers on Paris Nice Stage 2. How that one didn’t ended in disaster I’ll never know.

This led to the almost inevitable reminiscing about Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, what a name, what a rider… what crashes. Crazy Legs related how his brother idolised the “Tashkent Terror” and how they’d made the trip to the 1992 Tour of Britain just to see him. Spotted sitting dressed in full team kit in the back of a Carrera car with the doors wide open, our two intrepid fans tentatively approached and asked, “Are you Abdoujaparov?” To which all they received was a very blunt and very emphatic, “Nyet.”

This, Crazy Legs admonished OGL, was how you effectively master the one-word answer and put it to brutal and effective use to shut down any chance of further communication.

OGL trotted out a hoary old tale about someone ordering a custom built frame that he wanted to be the exact same colour as his … err… gentleman’s helmet shall we say. We argued that this would surely vary by individual, and matching with a Pantone reference swatch would be a difficult and unenviable task. I could only imagine someone going into their local B&Q store, walking up to the Paint Mixing counter, slapping their “junk” down (as I believe the youth of today call it) and suggesting they, “Match that!”

News of Phil-Gil’s pre-Amstel Gold altercation with a motorist in which he sustained a broken finger had led to suggestions he’d used a pepper spray that he carries when out on a training ride. I know motorists in our country can be unreasonable, but I’ve never felt the need to carry a concealed weapon. We did wonder about what damage you could do using a CO2 canister as a weapon of last resort.

OGL then retold the tale of a legendary local cyclist having an altercation with a driver on the Tyne Bridge, reaching through the open window to remove the keys from the ignition and casually flipping them over the side and into the river some 85 feet below, before pedalling calmly away. I like to think there is perhaps a small grain of truth in these stories, but like tribal folklore they’ve become somewhat embellished and exaggerated over the years and countless re-tellings. You can decide for yourself how much of this tale is true, or if you’re a Social Anthropologist, perhaps you’ve just found the subject for your next thesis.

OGL was also replete with all the latest scurrilous club gossip that we all seem completely ignorant of, or perhaps more accurately are luckily impermeable to. He described one of the girl’s changing personal circumstances, which didn’t seem to have made even the smallest, slightest ripple on our collective conscience. As Taffy Steve concluded the news was largely unimportant and irrelevant to us: “It’s not as if she’s bought a new set of wheels or anything.”

Ride Profile

The Waffle:

Yet again cold rain was falling from grey, overcast skies as I pushed off, clipped in and rolled downhill. Is this really what they had in mind when they promised me global warming? We’re into April already and I’m still waiting for the transition to spring weather.

On the first corner bright patches of rainbow-hued diesel were blooming ominously across the wet tarmac like malevolent flowers and I slowed and inched gingerly between them, before hitting the straight and letting gravity pull me down.

Unusually the roads were quite busy with serious looking cyclists and I passed around 7 on my way to the meeting point, all of them heading in the opposite direction. This had me wondering if they knew something I didn’t, but I pressed on regardless.

Pausing only long enough to view the utter chaos caused by ever expanding roadworks where the High Street becomes the Great North Road, I indulged in a bit of alleyway rat-running in the narrow spaces between the endless lines of double-parked cars that horribly crowd all the streets in this area. It can’t be much fun to be a kid growing up here.

Arriving at the meeting point I was amazed to find OGL already there and waiting and other riders started to arrive in dribs and drabs until around 14 brave lads and lasses were grouped together ready to ride.

As an indication of how bad the weather was, the G-Dawg collective had received special dispensation to ride their winter bikes, no doubt having completed the blood sacrifice of several chickens, goats, all the family pets and perhaps even a blood relative to the Great and Ancient Bicycle Tree in order to receive its blessing. Despite the extreme conditions, G-Dawg still insisted on wearing shorts though, if only to demonstrate his utter disdain for the weather.

I was feeling somewhat below par with a low key headache that had been hanging around for a couple of days and seemed to pulse more strongly now I’d confined my head in a helmet, provoking a distinct feeling of queasiness. It was all a bit like suffering from a hangover with none of the benefits of over-indulgence the night before.

By contrast Goose was properly and professionally hungover, looking pale and tired and he would spend most of the ride hanging gamely off the back, somehow managing to drag himself around behind everyone else. It was not perhaps a hangover cure he would recommend or be in a hurry to repeat.

I bounced around a bit as we set out, chatting to Taffy Steve, OGL and both FNG’s. One of these I’d been expecting, he’d recently moved house and left a club my work colleague Mr. T. rides with. Now we had the chance to lure him away from the civilising light and let him embrace his dark side.

A sudden dip and climb out of a sharp valley had me swerving around the Prof, who’d pulled up to reclaim his Garmin after, in his own words, “the mount suddenly shattered.” I uncharitably translated this to the perhaps more accurate, “my elastic band broke” and then was delighted to learn at the café that the device wasn’t held on by an actual, fit-for-purpose, regular, store-bought elastic band, but rather a strip of bright pink rubber the Prof had “constructed” from a cast off Marigold glove.

At the split I then watched a post-micturition Prof, more familiar with just stepping over his small-wheeled velocipede, struggling with the unfamiliarity of how to climb gracefully back onto his grown-up’s bike. I suggested to Taffy Steve we might have to start carrying a mounting block just to help him out.

OGL surprisingly had no takers for the amblers group and everyone else was soon grinding up the climb to Dyke Neuk. At the junction a few of us had to quickly abort a right-hand turn as a vintage car swooped too fast around the bend ahead. A few miles further on and two dozen more encounters with vintage jalopy’s heralded the fact that we were riding through the middle of the 8^th Flying Scotsman Classic Car Endurance Rally.

Many of the vintage car drivers returned our cheery waves, some sneered at us with disdain while we giggled at their stupid helmets (no doubt they were giggling at ours too) – and I’m pretty certain a good few of them never even saw us as they thrashed along, peering myopically through their immeasurably small and restrictive windshields perched at the back of massively long, massively tall bonnets.

They did however provide an interesting photo opportunity as they passed one of our backmarkers, purely by accident the grime and muck on the camera case conspiring to give the photo a faded, old fashioned, epic feel, like some post-war Tour shot half way up a mountain. I liked it anyway.

The Pinarello FNG was really struggling now and we had to slow and wait several times, producing a strange sort of stop-start sprint. Proof, if any were needed, that it’s not about the bike.

As we pounded up the last slope I’d managed to manoeuvre myself from last place into 4^th behind G-Dawg, Son of G-Dawg and a rampaging Captain Black, only to be royally mugged by Taffy Steve on the very last ramp as I faded. The bugger makes a habit of doing that to me and seems to take a huge amount of pleasure and satisfaction from it too.

As we left the café G-Dawg could be seen looking out for the Pinarello Police he was convinced were going to turn up with bolt cutters to unceremoniously snip and strip the mudguards from the Dogma, if not take the bike into protective custody for its own safety.

I found the pain in my lungs and legs following the sprint to the café seemed to have driven away the niggling headache and enjoyed the return home, feeling quite chipper.

Descending Berwick Hill we were treated to a loud horn fusillade as an overtaking RIM gave vent to his anger at being delayed by all of 5 seconds and I couldn’t help but laugh as, to a man and in perfect unison every single one of us gave the driver our biggest, cheesiest and most cheerful wave.

Splitting from the group I found the approach to the last roundabout before the Heinous Hill uncharacteristically snarled up with traffic. I slotted into the queue behind a car proudly displaying the bright red badge of Audax UK – the long distance cyclists’ association, and as we crept forward by increments I had the chance for a brief chat with the driver.

He thought I looked particularly vulnerable stuck in the middle of all the traffic and was looking for a way to help me across the roundabout, but as we both finally agreed, things are what they are and there wasn’t a lot either of us could do about it.

Roundabouts and traffic safely negotiated, I thought Mother Nature had saved the final insult for last, as a hail shower accompanied me all the way up the hill. The cruellest twist however was kept for Sunday which dawned, cold but bright, dry and cloudless from horizon to horizon. Maybe next week will be better?

YTD Totals: 2,055 km / 1,277 miles with 19,089 metres of climbing

Bryter Layter

Club Run, Saturday 9^th April, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 118 km/73 miles with 1,128 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 43 minutes

Average Speed: 24.9 km/h

Group size: 20 riders no FNG’s

Temperature: 11°C

Weather in a word or two: Bryter layter

Main topic of conversation at the start:

The Prof was once again sporting his rubberised canvas workman’s gloves, much to the delight of Crazy Legs who’d missed their grand unveiling last week and now wanted to know if we’d be stopping along the route to trim hedges and do a bit of impromptu gardening.

G-Dawg had been tempted to engage in a bit of one-upmanship and wear Mrs. G-Dawg’s heavy duty gardening gauntlets which he described as having cuffs that come up well past the elbows, but sense, or perhaps the limited space in his back pocket prevailed.

The Prof compounded his eccentric image by slipping off the gloves to reveal he wore but one single inner liner under them. Perhaps he alternated this left to right to make sure he always had at least one warm hand?

He then complained that this blog had ridiculed his gloves for being orange, when they were in fact fuchsia pink. I somehow feel he’s missing the point if he thinks the exact shade of the gloves was the source of our amusement.

Nevertheless…

The Red Max revealed the Monkey Butler Boy had been allowed to go out for his first ride sans parental guidance yesterday, despite the obvious concerns of his Mum. He’d completed a ride of over 50 miles and returned safely, but as Red Max concluded, even if he’d become lost it would have been a valuable lesson. I seem to recall the Apache tribe had a similar form of child upbringing, letting them put their hands in a fire because that’s how they learn that fire hurts and is dangerous.

A very hungover OGL rolled up having been out the previous night for some celebration or other for the King of the Grogs. He was able to update us about the status of Plumose Pappus, last seen painting the café red from a deep wound in his arm. Luckily nothing was broken and no plastic surgery was required, but the elbow is now held together by over twenty stitches like a bad piece of macramé.

OGL then informed us the local council were a little irate at our misuse of the Great North Road Cyclemaze and Deathtrap™ and one angry local resident had started taking pictures of scofflaw cyclists daring to ride on the roads. I can just imagine the pitchforks being sharpened and residents Faecesbook pages starting to burn up.

I sometimes wonder if all the general public hate cyclists.

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

Captain Black complained about over-heating having dressed appropriately for the deluge forecast by AccuWeather that never actually arrived and he had to be enticed out a corner where he was railing loudly about how they should “re-name their bloody site “INaccuWeather.”

G-Dawg owned up to inflicting an inappropriate ear-worm on Crazy Legs, whose usual selection of punky-new wave-alternative had been subverted by a loud rendition of MOR hen-night staple, “Dancing on the Ceiling.” The inspiration for this had been G-Dawg’s retelling of encountering a commercial van emblazoned with the legend: “Lino Ritchie – Flooring Contractor” complete with the unforgettable tagline “Is it me you’re looking for…”

(Edit: Or according to one commentator possibly, “is it me your looking floor” which is even worse)

For cheesiness this ranks up there with female tiling contractor, “Bonnie Tiler” or the D.C. Poultry Farm vans that bear the tagline, “Poultry in motion.”

We pondered whether G-Dawgs heartbeat was calibrated in beats per hour, or maybe per day. He did remind us of his “funny turn” last year though, when like a bad house re-mix his heart rate had inexplicably hit 225 beats per minute and how for a brief period he was able to completely baffle medical science.

Crazy Legs had been absent last week due to a big family gathering in London from where he’d returned full of wry observations about the differences between “us” and “them down there.” He also came back flushed with multiple successes while playing Cards Against Humanity, and felt he was so good at the game he was wondering if there was a semi-pro circuit he could join.

He then mentioned an obituary for “some dead Country and Western singer” (Merle Haggard) where the writer suggested you hadn’t lived unless you’d heard him perform. It has to be said that Crazy Legs was wholly and completely unconvinced.

This led to a wide ranging discussion about music, dancing, if Harry Connick Jnr ever lived down the burden of being labelled as the new Sinatra, the relationship between Nick Hornby and Bruce Springsteen and ultimately – ever divisive little Bobby Dylan. Keel piped up to reveal he’d actually seen Bob Dylan live and when I asked if he’d seen “Good Dylan” or “Bad Dylan” cryptically replied, “Half and half.”

The Waffle:

I woke to the rain drumming its fingers impatiently on the roof, promising yet another wet and cold club run, with conditions perhaps miserable enough to match last week for sheer bleakness and discomfort.

I was then faced with the choice between the summer bike and the potentially more comfortable, but less fun winter bike, complete with mudguards. Oh well, skin is waterproof and bikes can be cleaned, it wasn’t that difficult a choice after all.

By the time I rolled out encased in waterproof jacket and overshoes the rain had eased to a fine drizzle, but the roads were awash, the spray was flying and I was grateful for all the protection I could get.

I eased gently down the hill beneath a sky banded in distinct layers of cloud, from light to dark like a giant monochrome Neapolitan. Pewter clouds overlaid a silver base, while the whole was capped by a thick, dark layer of ominous, brooding graphite that looked heavy with the potential for more serious rain. Yet, off to the west patches of blue were starting to appear with the fleeting promise of improved weather.

I made good time and arrived very early at the meeting place, circling around the block a few times until others started to show. Surprisingly the rain had stopped and the sky lightened enough to suggest we were no longer in danger of a downpour. I took a gamble and slipped off and stowed the rain jacket.

As we pushed off, clipped in and set out I dropped in alongside Moscas, discussing how it was still too cold for shorts despite the numerous showings of pale flesh and goose-pimpled legs –those around me must be more hardened, or simply lulled into believing it is actually summer just because we’ve passed some totally arbitrary calendar milestone.

Today was definitely a one where we could prove Horner’s Theorem: the direct and measureable relationship between the number of shiny, posh and clean carbon bikes out on a spring or autumn morning and the number of crap-covered farm tracks, pothole and gravel strewn roads, gates and cattle grids OGL will “accidently” include in our ride.

We deviated from one of our more normal routes, ostensibly to recce the course for a race tomorrow that a few of group were competing in, but in reality more as a punishment for those who dared risk riding without mudguards – or smuguards as I commonly refer to them in these situations – given the superior, contented looks on the faces of those who have them.

Mud was very much the order of the day, the roads were filthy and caked so deep in places that I was surprised they hadn’t been ploughed and planted. Bikes and riders were quickly pebble-dashed with a fine layer of wet grime, slimy mud and whatever effluvia had been washed out of the fields to liberally coat the tarmac such a disturbing and distasteful shade of brown.

A very hungover OGL was soon tailing off the back on a long but fairly moderate uphill grind and never seemed to regain control of the group.

While waiting for him to re-join at a junction I was able to admire Richard of Flanders new saddle, a harlequin patterned Cinelli number he liked the look of, but declared was actually bloody uncomfortable.

We then learned about his plans for future bike upgrades while Taffy Steve took him to task for not fully engaging with outrageous Italian pronunciation and exaggerated arm waving:

“Kahm-pahn-nyoh-lo Vell-oh-chay. Badda-bing, badda-boom!”

OGL disappeared for good soon afterwards, slipping quietly away to the café nursing his hangover. We split the group at Dyke Neuk, but I only saw Moscas and the Red Max heading off for a shorter, easier route, everyone else opting for a longer, harder, faster run which soon had us grinding our way up through Longwitton.

We next hurtled downhill, over some teeth-rattling, filling-loosening speed bumps before hauling hard on the brakes and swinging left along a lane that eventually spat us out at the bottom of Middleton Bank.

An old junker car farted loudly past us and then backfired, releasing a cloud of noxious fumes. The driver redlined it, attacking the hill at maximum revs with the engine clattering and sputtering, coughing and screaming while we all laughed, jeered loudly and egged him on.

The air cleared and a kind of silence had returned before we started our own assault on the slope. As the steepest ramp bit and G-Dawg levered himself up to stomp on the pedals I slipped around him and pushed on off the front, easing as I neared the top so we could regroup. Keel and G-Dawg caught and passed me and I tucked in to follow the wheels.

A fairly large bunch now began homing in on the café and the pace started to ramp up predictably. We held together over the rollers, before the Plank launched a kamikaze attack down the outside and directly into the path of an onrushing car. He quickly switched back to the left hand lane, but his attack seemed to sputter and die out suddenly and he was washed away by a surging front group.

I wasn’t particularly engaged in the sprint as we started up the last rise, so pretty much tried to keep my pace at a steady level, hard enough to hurt somewhat, but without threatening to blow up. I passed a few and a few passed me. Some of those I’d passed managed to recuperate and pass me again, while some who’d passed me faded and were overhauled. It was all a little chaotic and confusing and I have to admit I wasn’t keeping count of who ended up where.

In the café I sat round the table with G-Dawg, Crazy Legs and Taffy Steve talking a massive volume of complete and utter garbage as the rest of our group flowed in and around us, then finished and flowed out, leaving us behind as we waved them away.

The café was almost empty when we finally decided it was time to leave, stopping only to have a chat and reassure the staff that Plumose Pappus was well and recovering and that yes, he is actually more than 14 years old.

As the four of us rolled home Crazy Legs returned to his Cards Against Humanity theme declaring with complete conviction that childishness was the key to winning and that he would easily win simply because he was the most childish amongst us.

At first I was unconvinced, but midway through his argument an immense blob on a big motorbike roared closely past, ruffling G-Dawgs hair and startling him so much he reckoned he’d see a visible heart-rate spike in his Strava data.

“Feck off, you fat fecker!” Crazy Legs screamed petulantly after the impressively loud, already distant motorbike and I held up my hand in resignation and readily admitted he was right all along … he really was the most childish amongst us.

Crazy Legs was now in a very happy place and declared that it had been a great ride. Taffy Steve concluded that this was probably in no small part to OGL’s early departure and suggested we had a whip-round to see if we could encourage him to indulge in a hangover inducing drinking session every Friday. This sounded remarkably similar to our very cunning plan to nobble Son of G-Dawg in the café sprint and it’s all beginning to sound a bit expensive. Probably worth it though.

Crazy Legs and Taffy Steve turned off and I led G-Dawg through the Mad Mile at a (hopefully) respectable pace before swinging off to head home.

At the next T-Junction I saw a large swarm of riders approaching and signalling that they were turning left in front of where I waited. With the car inside acting like an NFL pulling guard on an end-around and effectively screening me from other road users I swung out behind it to cross the lanes, but was struck simultaneously by vicious cramp in both my left calf and right foot.

I managed to groan and grimace across to the other side and pull up haltingly at the kerb, barely registering or acknowledging that the passing cyclists were the rest of our group who’d left the café twenty minutes ahead of us.

Stretching and flexing until the pain finally faded, I began to pick my way home, although for a few miles I was conscious of a general tightening of the calf muscles and more cramps lurking in the background. In a Crazy Legs inspired moment I became hooked on an ear-worm that pulled me into a song-cycle by The Cramps, while I found myself emptying my water bottle to try and stave off further attacks.

I was well into my 3^rd internalised chorus of “Goo Goo Muck” as I climbed the Heinous Hill, only to be stopped mid-song as I was flagged down by a uniformed nurse walking down the hill. I pulled to the side of the road and unclipped wondering if she needed directions, thought I’d dropped something, or just maybe had a grievance with cyclists she felt an urgent need to express.

“’Scuse me,” she said, “I just wanted to say how much I admire you for riding up this hill!”

Somewhat taken aback and quite flustered by this unexpected praise I muttered something barely comprehensible about how much I hated the damn slope before pushing off, clipping in and resuming my upward grind, although not I’ll admit without an added spring in my legs.

Maybe not all the general public hate cyclists after all…

YTD Totals: 2,055 km / 1,277 miles with 19,089 metres of climbing

Ooph!

Club Run, Saturday 2^nd April, 2016

My Ride (according to Strava)

Total Distance: 102 km/63 miles with 495 metres of climbing

Ride Time: 4 hours 4 minutes

Average Speed: 25.0 km/h

Group size: 25 riders

Temperature: 10°C

Weather in a word or two: Dreich

Main topic of conversation at the start:

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the BFG was convinced that summer had arrived and was here to stay and so had undertaken the first ritual leg shaving of the year. He stood there showing off his bare calves to Aveline and me, turning them this way and that so even the wan, weak sunlight bounced glaringly off the parchment pale skin and highlighted all the nicks and cuts he’d inadvertently carved into himself – it looked like he’d shaved using a cheese-grater.

Horrifyingly, he then rolled back his knee warmers to show that the shaving stopped at the tops of his calves, creating a look not too dissimilar to a hairy-kneed bactrian camel. I guess he’d felt impelled not to shave any further to avoid passing out from the accumulated blood loss. Death by a thousand cuts?

The Prof turned up wearing a pair of bright orange, Council issue, rubberised builder’s gloves. After first suggesting he’d picked them up from the nearby salt bin where some workman had misplaced them while gritting the roads, G-Dawg then asked the most pertinent questions of the day:

“So, are you going to be emptying all the bins on the way around?”

Son of G-Dawg was looking decidedly under the weather, having over-indulged in a late night drinking session, the kind often (and invariably falsely) described around these parts as “going for a swift half.”

The BFG confessed that he was a frequent user of the dishwasher to clean his bike parts, but admitted he had to get up really early on a morning and sneak the parts through on the quick wash/eco cycle in order for his dirty secrets not to be discovered by Mrs. BFG.

He also suggested oven cleaner was a great way of keeping his chains spotlessly clean…

Main topic of conversation at the coffee stop:

More cleaning reminiscing ensued, with both G-Dawg and OGL extolling the forgotten virtues of Duraglit for polishing wheel hubs and spokes. I was always a Brasso and newsprint boy myself – an odd combination that somehow seemed to work and is apparently also useful for polishing straight razors, if you’re crazy enough to own and use one. I certainly feel these are extremely dangerous implements that the BFG would be best to carefully avoid, despite his fondness for the old way of doing things.

Carlton attributed the growth in the popularity of cycling in Colombia to the fact that drug lords had used a small portion of their ill-gotten fortunes to build velodromes. Taffy Steve suggested they were already doing the drugs, so it was a completely logical next step to embrace cycling as well – the two seemed to fit together so perfectly, hand in glove.

[A little after the moment digging did in fact reveal that notorious drug lord and gangster Pablo Escobar was an early version of the dodgy cycling patron with the kind of dangerous persona that Oleg Tinkov probably has wet dreams about owning. Pablo’s brother Roberto Escobar was a professional cyclist, national champion and team coach, so there were obviously strong links between the cartels and cycling.]

Taffy Steve recommended “Breaking the Chain,” Willy Voet’s book about the Festina affair. The hapless Voet was the team soigneur caught by the police with a car loaded down with enough drugs to fuel the entire Russian Olympic programme for the next 30 years. He was then ordered by his team to claim they were all just for personal use. To cap it all Voet’s was actually banned from driving at the time. Ooph!

Conversation turned to other sports and their own doping problems with BFG expressing some bewilderment that Maria Sharapova had admitted illegal drug use. Slowly it dawned on him that the last press-conference she’d given was actually her admission of wrong-doing, despite the fact that all he’d heard was a slightly accented Eastern European female whispering, “Aren’t I pretty? Yes, I’m pretty. I’m so pretty.” He now realises that this repetitious mantra was just his own thoughts swirling aimlessly around in his head and he really must start to pay more attention.

Taffy Steve snorted in derision that Sharapova earns so much more money than Serena Williams, despite being clearly outclassed in terms of both talent and achievements, but perhaps the BFG’s unintended thrall explains why this is.

A decidedly ill-looking Son of G-Dawg stared down a can of Coke for a while, before deciding to push off home early and try to recover. I suggested a weekly collection to provide him with beer money every Friday night as a way we could perhaps beat him in the café sprint more regularly. It seems a small price to pay.

Unless we were to find him curled up asleep under a hedge somewhere on the way back it was fairly obvious he was going to make it home long before G-Dawg and enjoy all the advantages of the first bath.

We suggested G-Dawg shouldn’t hang around too long as he’d be getting second use of the bathwater and it might be cold if he wasn’t quick. We then wondered if he might only get third use of the bathwater if Son of G-Dawg was being particularly diligent and decided to give his bike a quick rinse too.

Ride Profile

The Waffle:

It was grey overcast and damp from the outset and by the time 25 riders pushed off, clipped in and rode out, the rain was misting down quite heavily and was destined to continue falling throughout the entire duration of the ride.

I slotted in alongside a fellow rider who’d ridden with us pretty much throughout the entire winter, no matter how horrible the weather – and who I realised I had never spoken to and knew nothing about. This wasn’t going to change today either as we progressed in what I like to think of as companionable silence – although he probably thinks I’m just aloof, arrogant and unsociable.

To be honest I’m not a great initiator of talk when in the bunch, which I guess is quite surprising given how verbose and florid my writing is – I’ll readily admit to a writing style that never uses three words when thirteen will do.

After a prolonged spell we rotated and my silent partner slipped back, perhaps to find more amenable company, while I found myself next to OGL. Quiet, contemplative riding wasn’t an option anymore, but all I needed to do was drop the small change of a conversational gambit into his Wurlitzer mind, it would click and whirr and feedback to me astonishing or outlandish tales, facts, opinions, conjecture, speculation, exaggeration and information.

In a short space of time we’d covered Cath Wiggins’s drinking habits and exercise regimen, disk brakes in the peloton, the demise of neutral service vehicles, haircuts, Van Nichols bikes, 12 speed gears, Hope hubs, the latest Di2 advances and his plans for a new bike.

Our (or should I say his) discourse was interrupted when Aveline punctured and warned she would need help as her tyres were a bit of a bugger to work on and off. True enough, even with OGL’s pincer like claws and well-honed skills, repairs seemed to take an inordinate amount of time, although I was too far away to see what the exact problem was, a few of us having wandered away to irrigate the verges.

Standing by the side of the road getting progressively colder and wetter, the conversation turned to this very blog, with Taffy Steve warning that it was almost impossible to identify riders from their nicknames without an extensive knowledge of cheesy 80’s popular culture and rather obscure and eccentric etymology. We then left Ovis to ponder exactly where his moniker came from.

As we were finally about to get underway again, Laurelan swung past to inform us that OGL had condemned her bike as a certain death-trap, something she took quite phlegmatically, if not with a certain degree of pride. (Her Strava entries are always cleverly titled and this one bore the legend: “Mine’s a death trap, what’s yours?”)

When pressed as to what made her bike quite so lethal, apparently it was poorly wrapped tape, slipping gears and ill-fitting bar end plugs. Ooph!

We were starting to home in on the café now and the pace was noticeably quicker. A quick double-take showed me OGL poised on the outside near the front and I briefly wondered if he was winding up for an attack to show us all how it’s done.

Taffy Steve then cruised up to zeB, verbally challenged his manhood and everything suddenly kicked off. The two of them jumped away and the pace of everyone leaped up a notch as they accelerated to close the gap.

I found myself surfing the wheels, jumping from one to another and at one point latched onto G-Dawg and waited for him to tow me effortlessly across as he closed the gap. I waited too long before realising that with an ailing Son of G-Dawg he wasn’t all that interested this week. Finally swinging around him just as Andeven surged past, I latched onto this wheel and he took me up to and past the BFG before braking for the Snake Bends.

We carefully threaded our way through the bends, across the junction and out onto the main road. To me the race is done at this point, so I dropped onto the BFG’s wheel for a while until we caught Taffy Steve and I eased off as Captain Black thundered past on the outside.

“Did you have to challenge beZ quite so directly?” I asked Taffy Steve and should have anticipated the reply that was accompanied by a purely evil grin, “Fuck yeah!”

On the way back from the café I rode chatting with Carlton and then the BFG, who told me how an old boss used to condemn poor work with a shake of the head and a single explosive, “Ooph!”

He said he’d been caught using the phrase unconsciously and quite audibly whenever he was confronted by something or someone that particularly attracted his derision, such as one of the more inappropriately dressed denizens of Newcastle on a “big night out.”

Mrs. BFG was convinced that sooner or later he was going to be overheard and attract some undue physical disagreement. In fact, she suggested he’d only avoided it so far because of his imposing size.

Nevertheless, I had to admit an instant attraction to such a succinct, meaningful and useful expression, differing only from the BFG in how it should be written down– he prefers a particularly Anglo-Saxon version: “Oof!” while I like a more Gallic: “Ooph!”

On the way home a number of Garmin’s gave up the ghost, finding the weather too much, this included Carlton’s which died a slow death as power ran out. My own continued to work, but produced a rather odd profile which included what looked like a traverse down a vertical cliff face after around 65km.

As it is I can’t be wholly sure of how accurately it was recording climbing metres, but they were sufficiently low to confirm we’d done far less than normal. Perhaps that would explain how I could effortlessly sit behind the BFG and G-Dawg as they surged through the Mad Mile, using their speed to slingshot round the mini-roundabout and head for home alone.

3 Strava solo PR’s on the way back also suggested the ride had been easier than normal and I had an unusual surfeit of energy left. I was even pleasantly surprised to find on one segment, West Denton Way, I’d posted the 10^th fastest time. Ever. Ooph!

Still going strong up Heinous Hill I crested the last ramp, not to cheering crowds, but the sibilant hiss of escaping air. My front tyre was flat by the time I’d carried the bike up the front steps, still I guess if I have to have a puncture I can’t think of a better time and place for it.

YTD Totals: 1,880 km / 1,168 miles with 17,307 metres of climbing

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.

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

Sur La Jante

The Chronicles, Confessions and Idle Musings of a Club Cyclist

Tag: road cycling

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