Your ride today.... (part 1)

[snakehips]

Nine laps anti of Richmond Park road. Lovely day for it.

http://www.yudu.com/item/details/28055/Snakehips--Bikes-
Snakehips Bikes

 

[Bigtwin]

A modest 12m on the bent today, to get some nosh from Waitrose.

Luverley cruising along in comfort in the sunshine.

Planning an early ride and cafe breakfast before I get onto the golf course in the morning. Hard life...

 

[Bman]

Only jumped on the bike for 10 minutes today, down the shops for some beer.

Some woman on an old moped held me back for a bit and only just accelerated away from me around the 20mph mark.

Just wait till I get my new bike!

 

[Shaun]

Pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... pedal ... BANG!

And that was it for my ride tonight.

I wouldn't mind, I'd been looking forward to it all day.

Bloody great sharp bit of flint (no doubt of one of those aggrigate lorries) sliced into the tyre and BANG it went, and wobble went the back end, and parrrppp went me !!!!

Managed to get a tube in under really low pressure and nurse it back, but very disappointed.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[gbb]

Didnt finish work till 7pm so too late for any meaningful ride ...
So, just a few miles commute with a blast. 1 mile warm up, then hell for leather.
Came honking full pelt round a bend on the estate....2 lads gave some light hearted imitation of a motorbike. Must have impressed them

 

[luplowe]

Blew my previous best of 99 out the water with 101 miles ..bournemouth .southhamton. salisbury back to bournemouth.. sweaty shorts today..

 

[I am Spartacus]

Just over 3 hours .... damn

 

[Bigtwin]

Just over 3 hours .... damn

Christ - you finished off higher than you started! But yet, come down more than you went up!

 

[I am Spartacus]

Christ - you finished off higher than you started! But yet, come down more than you went up!

such are the foibles of Bike hike but it's close enough and the weather was faultless and there were just a few others also avoiding the humdrum of life

 

[willhub]

Just over 3 hours .... damn

How many miles?


I did 22 miles flat today, not feeling too good, 18.8mph average, at the end I did 3 intervals and just tried to push as hard as I could from point a to point b then take it normal pace then same again.

 

[I am Spartacus]

How many miles?


I did 22 miles flat today, not feeling too good, 18.8mph average, at the end I did 3 intervals and just tried to push as hard as I could from point a to point b then take it normal pace then same again.

about 47 when I switched off the bike comp... but kept it steady eddy.. I've got another 34 mile round trip in about 25 mins time.. even tho keeping to the back lanes.. the traffic will no doubt be irksome

 

[marinyork]

What a change. Blazing sunshine last night (after a dreary day) through the edges of the Peaks and small valleys above Chesterfield. Tonight total cloud cover, quite windy so I actually wound up and only did about 30 miles.

 

[dellzeqq]

Streatham Hill to Warwick

This was a bit of a mess. The plan was to go to Birmingham and take the train back. Not a bad plan, because the Chiltern Line trains will take bikes without prior booking, and their afternoon fares are far less expensive than Virgin or First Great Western. I could do a bit of reminiscing about a former life on the way. But, first….

I’d intended to get up at barmy o’clock and leave at first light, returning in time to be at home when the Kid got in from school. I’d gone to bed at 8.30, but the Kid, who had gone off to see some boy or other called at nine and told me she’d forgotten her keys. She would be home at ten. She called again at a quarter to eleven and said that she’d been waiting for a 201 bus for forty minutes, and when the bus came it had gone straight by. There followed one of those completely hopeless inter-generational conversations that get regurgitated on the psychiatrist’s couch. ‘Why didn’t you catch a 37 to Brixton and take a bus up the hill?’ ‘I don’t know where to catch a 37’. ‘Why don’t you get a bus map and carry it around with you…?’ Which proves beyond doubt that parents can say sensible things which are, nonetheless, completely idiotic. So it was twenty past eleven when the taxi hove in to view, with me sitting on the front wall with a twenty pound note in my hand. Me – ‘do you want a tip?' Taxi driver ‘Yes, thanks very much’. Me ‘here’s my tip – don’t have children, they’re too expensive’.

And then, waking at a quarter past four, and munching my way through five Oatibix and a couple of bananas, I made a big mistake in opening Cycle Chat without logging on, treating myself to the pearls of wisdom that my Ignore List usually spares me. Twenty minutes of that and I could feel the strength draining from my legs. So, after leaving home at 5.30 and not feeling as sportive as I might I turned not for the A40 out to Denham (and thence the A413), but for the A41 to Aylesbury, reasoning that the light glancing off the Grand Union canal would cheer me up. I knew that the A41 would be forty minutes slower, but, if I didn’t make it home until later than planned, that was OK. Kennington Lane was its usual smooth, leafy self, and the Houses of Parliament were a picture in the early morning light. Swiss Cottage always looks good early in the morning and I skimmed up the hill on the tail of a National Express bus feeling quite at home with the idea of an Akeman Street Special.

I thought I might speculate idly on the differences between North London and South London suburbs. Instead I idled while speculating on traffic lights as repositories of civic virtue, and the death toll which included foxes, squirrels, a badger, a deer and a milk float, which sat, abandoned, on the Hempstead Way. I did recall that once before I’d ridden this road at night with my head down, watching my shadow overtake me as I passed under the streetlights. That wouldn’t happen now – the trees have grown in the last quarter century! So, I thought, my cycling career has seen governments come and go, trousers go wider and narrower, and now saplings turn to mighty oaks. All that remained was geological time! And, I was so pleased with this thought that it didn’t occur to me that, in that intervening twenty five years, some bright spark might have moved the A41. Which they had. So, where I should have caught the A4251 which is the old Roman Road, a route that served for 2000 years, running flat and straight through the valley beside the canal, I got on to the DfT’s new ‘motorway by stealth’ A41 that goes up and down, up and down and is full of brain dead commuters doing seventy miles an hour. And for 12 miles this is what I did, grinding up in 53-18 and swooping down on 53-12 , sticking to the white line at the road’s margin like grim death, other than to swerve round the occasional bit of debris, until, a little late in the day, I did catch the old route through Tring, and then, after the scarp slope of the Chilterns had afforded me the most marvellous view of Aylesbury Vale, I hit the last bit of unmodernised two lane road in to Aylesbury,

Ah, Aylesbury! Home to the Ducks, pound for pound the worst team in England! I remember Aylesbury playing England, Gary Lineker and all, with the England coach parking in the forecourt of Askeys ice cream cone factory. Those were the days. Now they get walloped by teams like Ford, which is not even a village team, but a railway level crossing and prison officers’ club team.

Physically Aylesbury hasn’t changed greatly in thirty years. The ring road is still flanked by the kind of 60s three bedroom semis that, back in 1980, I really wanted to live in. I missed the hospital in which the girls were born (now turned to flats) but drank in the tawdry car dealerships on the A41 going west out of town, although the biggest from former times, ‘Perry’s for Ford’ had gone the way of all flesh. Only after I'd left did I recall that Aylesbury is a cycling demonstration town. I saw thousands of cars, some in motion, some stuck in jams, and all of three bikes.

I’d intended to go the back way to Bicester, through Quainton and Marsh Gibbon, but, pulled by morbid interest, stuck with the main road until I came to Our Layby of Near Death. Here’s where I found myself (or, rather, where someone else found me) a little before midnight on 31st March 1987, having been whacked by a Volvo some thirty yards previously. Sort of ordinary, even by layby standards. Not a good place to die.

Some pondering on mortality later I continued to Waddesdon. The house, derelict when I bought it for £15,000 in 1984 was pretty much as it was after I’d sorted it out. There is (horrors) a satellite dish on the front, and the little front garden is dirty gravel where once sweet peas had clambered over the walls, but the windows were the very (cheap) ones that I put in, although much in need of painting.

I toured the village in a dull kind of a way, and then went to the Five Arrows for a coffee. What was once a rather posh pub with a bewhiskered landlord serving beer is now a hotel, redecorated in the most ghastly fashion. The ‘entrance’ has been moved to the back and the former bar is now the hotel dining room, with bookshelves populated by books bought by the yard and destined never to be read again. I ordered coffee, which was nice, but paying for it required the cooperation of a computerised till and the production of change, all of which was well beyond the talents of the staff who were extremely busy looking for something that somebody who was having a day off should have bought in…..so, having leant on the bar with a fiver in my hand for ten minutes I pushed off at just gone nine and headed west again.

A few miles down the road I took a right on to a farm driveway, and rode up to the yard, past the cottage in which the girls spent their first years.

The feed tower, softwood framed and clad in tin, lifted barn style with the Fordson Major’s fore end loader looked in good shape.

I called the farm, and then the mobile number on the answerphone. ‘Is that M…..?’ ‘It is’. ‘Good morning – my name’s Simon Legg’. Considering we hadn’t spoken in twenty five years he did pretty well. He walked up from the piggery looking pretty much the same – greyer, but with the same quick walk and still as trim. We asked each other how we were, and agreed that we were both older, but very few men of sixty six years are in that kind of shape. We drank coffee and talked for about forty minutes, which was probably longer than we’d talked in all of the six years I worked on the farm. Time melted. The roll call of friends and relatives did get a bit Charlusian, but the lives of those still with us had changed not greatly other than for their children growing up and moving away. His classic British sports cars are still running, although the Marcos, built around a hardwood frame, won’t be competing in the hill climb this year. The pigs had changed though – once ‘reverse torpedo’ Landrace Crosses, now Large Blacks, one of the rarest breeds, sold for a premium. 'British' pork, churned out of grotesque factory farms in Poland and the Netherlands, but processed here, makes basic pigmeat production in the UK almost impossible.

 

[dellzeqq]

So, having talked, we shook hands, and I turned west again, heading over the little rise at Kingswood, and out on to the Roman causeway built across an inland sea. I’d do this in 50-15 at a constant 22mph. Now, with a freshening tail wind, on a bike that makes the 531C Raleigh look crude I ran on 53-15, changing to 53-14 when passed by traffic. This six mile stretch of dead flat really is the road of truth. Lactic acid pours in to the leg muscles. Any interruption, however tiny, even the drain covers, is a relief. When the road rises at the Ambrosden turn, you keep the same gear but stand, and the change in position is a mercy. And then the downhill in to Bicester, which would also be a relief if the town was not such a complete disaster.

Bicester used to be a market town, but it got high on the USAF base at Upper Heyford, and, after that, motor racing. The motor racing remains, but the market has been replaced by car parking and the tackiest out of town tin shed shopping, starting with an abomination called Bicester Village, to which middle England flocks in search of ‘designer bargains’. New road after new road snakes through executive estates that look as if they’re on valium day and night. There are no pedestrians.

The M40, a disgrace even by the DfT’s lamentable standards, fuels Bicester’s growth. This same motorway has, in a perverse way, turned the old A41, now the B4100 in to a first class cycle route – rather like the ‘old’ A9. Smooth, the verges no longer cut back, running up dip slopes and down scarps at Aynho and Edge Hill, turning from time to time to change the view, it gets quieter and quieter, until, at Gaydon, where men in white coats used to design the cars of the future (who now remembers gas-turbine) there is perhaps one car a minute.

In between I stopped in Banbury to replace the pump that had fallen out of my back pocket on the flat. The bike shop that once saved me from walking the last twenty two miles of an epic 165 mile trek home from Liverpool had gone. There was a Halfords slightly away from the centre, with a mezzanine Bike Hut. The two boys behind the counter assured me that every pump they had would work. I asked them the way to Warwick, and they pointed east, so I selected the most basic pump they had, thinking that it would be the least likely to go wrong. Turning west, back on to the B4100, with the wind getting stiffer, and more behind me all the time, I started to up the pace a bit, hoping to reach Birmingham by lunchtime.

Two miles before Warwick the cap on the headset worked its way loose. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d given the headset a going over. Foolishly I let this worry me, and getting in to Warwick at half past twelve, went in search of a real bike shop. There wasn’t one – the tourist information office told me that this was ‘a sign of the times’, so, rather than go on for what would have been the least distinguished twenty miles of the trip I jumped on the train home, which was, at eighteen quid, a bit of a bargain. And so, having arrived back in Marylebone at half past two, and paid a brief visit to Brixton Cycles for them to tell me the head set was just dandy, I was home and showered at a quarter past three and down to Waitrose on the Brompton to re-stock on ice cream, oven chips and all those things that make the lives of teenagers almost bearable.

I might give this another go tomorrow. The basic idea is sound. There must be at least one sweet route from London to Birmingham, and, if I take my own advice and use a map, I’ll probably find it. There’s a minor road that runs by the canal at Hockley that looks good on the map, and it would be nice to go to Bourneville, and take a look at all the changes around the Bull Ring. Watch this space...

 

[Will1985]

I might give this another go tomorrow. The basic idea is sound. There must be at least one sweet route from London to Birmingham, and, if I take my own advice and use a map, I’ll probably find it. There’s a minor road that runs by the canal at Hockley that looks good on the map, and it would be nice to go to Bourneville, and take a look at all the changes around the Bull Ring.

If you do, be sure to let the Brum posse know! I'm less than 5 mins from Bournville.

Nice write-up too!