Love this... the toad whisperer! Presumably you managed to out-run them!
I'd have happily let them follow me home but I think they had more important things to do...
A mashup of the week's trivial happenings.. managed town-and-back nearly every ride, with a bit of variety, a few novelties and more crap photos than usual this week.
After the joy sparked by one day of sun last week it's been pretty cold and windy for most of the week, with a helping of mist on occasion including Monday morning:
Post-toad-ogling the route home involved the occasional cut-through from north Oxford to Botley down the side of the railway track past all the relatively new student accommodation:
Tuesday morning brought novelty in the form of a client visit in town - a decent little excursion as the bike brings real value in providing me an enjoyable trip versus someone else having to endure the traffic and lack of parking in the car, or the miseries of the bus. A straighforward job that I managed not to cock up, leaving into smatterings of glorious sun and a reminder that I'm lucky to live in such a nice part of the world.
The biggest point of note on the journey home was being somewhat inconsiderately / impatiently close-passed by a fellow cycist on a narrow bit of tow path. After this chap squeezed past on his road bike we both got stuck behind another slower cyclist for a moment.. when the path cleared my new nemesis pulled out to overtake and I followed.
When he pulled back in again I kept going - seated, lowish cadence putting in as much effort as I could get away with without obvious visible suggestion I was doing so. I carried on at a brisk if not balls-out pace for maybe thirty seconds before checking over my shoulder - expecting from the bloke's previous behaviour to find him hanging off my rear wheel but he was actually nowhere to be seen, which was amusing.
Not wanting my petty act of recrimination to be identified for what it was I kept my pace up all the way home, my glutes reminding me in the morning of the repercussions / value of the low-cadence, high load riding that most of us use the gears to escape.
Yesterday was also a bit abnormal. Waking very early and subsequently leaving a bit earlier I decided to take the tow / cycle paths both into and out of town to reduce the potential to encounter dickheads.. which went OK with little to report other than a healthy volume of other cyclists on the route.
The journey back was blighted by tiredness after an exhausting day, cold and wind. I only ventured a little way into town before turning onto the tow path and heading for home. I became aware of another cyclist sticking with me at a moderate pace, which turned out to be a woman on an ebike when she overtook a bit later. Given the modest gradients involved she wasn't travelling that much faster than me so I stayed with her for most of the journey, only getting dropped in a more residential bit where her electrical assistance gave a distinct advantage when accelerating up to speed after slowing for obstacles / turns.
Enthused by this little challenge in my own head as well as the shards of sun poking through the dark sky I carried on past the flat for an uncommon rural loop mostly down country lanes and past woodland. While not dickhead-free, this was very pleasant and a welcome antidote to the congested city traffic; shared for a bit with another bloke also on a steel tourer with many bags.
Another welcome reminder of what a nice part of the world I'm priviliged to live in (especially with seemingly the rest of the globe hell-bent on destroying itself). The week's mileage so far comes to a little under 100, pushing the rolling weekly total north of 120 miles for the first time in four months and the 30-day total past 400 miles for the first time since mid-December
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