I Don’t Mean To Be Rude, But …..

I got to thinking as I cycled along somewhat behind the rest of the group that cycling has a knack of bringing to the forefront of one’s consciousness the basic essences of your personality.  I am something of a loner; to be honest I’m not sure whether this is by nature or by social conditioning, your guess is as good as mine.  I am a person who enjoys his own company, perhaps it is because I was an only child.  So my default position, when I need to tackle a challenge or solve a problem, is to hive off on my own and work things out for myself no matter how long it takes.  On this trip, I was aware and grateful to be part of a team, but I am not one of those cyclists who wants to have a “deep and meaningful” with my fellow riders as we travel along.  In fact, I get quite cross when I see cyclists riding in a bunch across the road and thus impeding everything that wants to overtake them; riding like that is downright selfish and gets cyclists a bad name.  We on the team developed a strategy by which the last rider shouted “car” to the next rider up the line and so a warning jumped up to the front rider and we made sure that we kept well into the side of the road.  To return to my tendency to keep the “deep and meaningful” as an inner rather than an external conversation – Scott cycled up to me on one occasion and said, “all right, Mick?”  The response he got was somewhat similar to that received by a parent who asks their adolescent son what he has been up to on a given day; in other words, an incoherent grunt.  To give him his due, Scott recognised my loner tendency and respected it and did not appear to be particularly bothered by what could have been interpreted as downright rudeness on my part.

As we are on the subject of Scott, he reminds me in some ways of the guy I roomed with on the London to Paris ride, a ride which I did in 2014 between the two LEJOG rides.  This guy was actually a Scot from Glasgow named William, although everybody called him “Willie”.  We met when we were billeted together at a hotel in Kyriad Coquelles, just outside Calais, on the first night of the ride.  He was twice my size, amiable and as we were to spend several nights together I felt it might be wise to warn him that I snored horrendously and that I was not capable of climbing onto a top bunk any more.  His reply was accepting and charitable; well I think it was as I could only understand one in four words he uttered due to his extremely strong accent and the fact that my hearing is not as good as it used to be.  From what I could gather he had no problem with either of these confessions.  Willie had a crap bike which looked like it had been cobbled together from bits salvaged from a skip.  He was dressed largely in denim and wore on his feet enormous workman’s boots.  He was, in other words, the very antithesis of the ideal candidate for a long-distance cycling.  However, he managed to haul himself up every climb with ease largely, it appeared to me, by brute strength fuelled with considerable amounts of beer.  Now I am not suggesting that our Scott is Willie’s doppelganger but there are certain similarities.  Our Scott is a very powerfully built guy and also seems to have the capacity to haul his not inconsiderable bulk up hills and at times he even gave Ollie a run for his money.  Although our Scott has a much better bike and had done a lot of training for this ride (it was Willie’s proud boast that he had done none at all for London to Paris) there was a certain similarity in dress sense.  We were all attired in gleaming new Lycra, Scott by way of contrast, wore a pair of rather baggy old fashion cycling trousers and a tee shirt which was emblazoned back and front with a full-sized picture of a human skeleton.  In terms of communication the main difference between Scott and Scottish Willie was the fact I could understand Scott when he talked to me.  Sorry Scott for the somewhat brusque reply you got that day and thanks for understanding me as you did and respecting my antisocial stance on the bike.

Second lunch was taken in the car park of a small village pub which was conveniently shut.  This time the link up worked smoothly and thus the pattern for the two weeks riding was successfully established.  Lizzie had, at that point, serious doubts about her ability to ride the full distance every day so she decided to drop out after lunch and ride in big Cav to the end of the day’s route.  Now, personally I thought that Lizzie would be able to ride the whole distance, what she lacked was nothing to do with physicality, for like her brother Ollie, she was ideally placed to be a natural bike rider; I felt it was rather to do with lack of confidence.  I decided however that, at this point in the ride, it would be better to run with her pulling out and let her find her own legs and then if she showed signs of wanting to ride all day, which I thought given a day or two she would, I would then encourage her to have a go.  Naturally, this conversation would need to take place whilst I wasn’t riding my bike!

Buff King Hal

The first significant climb of the day was a fairly gentle climb of about five miles duration out of Land’s End with a five-mile descent to Penzance, then a bit of a false flat until the beginning of the climb to Porkellis.   Somewhere on this stretch we had arranged to have, “First Lunch”.  I say “somewhere” because we missed the agreed venue for the first lunch stop by staying ahead of Julia and Jo and the support cars and so they had to play catch up.  We eventually ate at a convenient patch of grass beside the road in a small village some miles from the planned stop.  As the support vehicles rolled to a halt and Julia and Jo emerged, a fruitless argument ensued as to whose fault is was that we hadn’t linked up as planned.

I should at this point explain what “First Lunch” and the subsequent “Second lunch” was all about.  As I explained earlier in the blog, it is important to keep the ten commandments of long-distance cycling.  On a long run having two lunches was our way of keeping commandments two and three, i.e. making sure we did not get hungry or thirsty.  These lunches were prepared for us by Julia and Jo and served out of the back of one of the support vehicles.  The aim was to get as many carbs into us as possible which would give us enough energy for the ride and would be easily burned off by the time we finished each day.  So, the daily menu consisted of bread rolls with various fillings, lots of pasta, malt loaf, fruit (particularly bananas) and so on.  When I was riding I also carried with me energy bars and dried bananas to eat in between these main meals.  We also carried large bottles of water in Big Cav in order to fill our individual water bottles at each lunch stop to ensure we did not get thirsty on route.

At this point I feel it is necessary to introduce Henry.  Now Henry is a personable, intelligent young man but with a tendency to live in a world of his own.  This attribute manifested itself at the first lunch stop on the first day and more or less on a daily basis thereafter.  “Now has everybody got enough water?”  Julia asked after we had finished lunch and had filled our water bottles for the next stage of the ride.  She then started packing the large, heavy water storage bottles in Big Cav in preparation for the off.  Then Henry piped up, “Is there any water?”  After a couple of days Julia and Jo developed a strategy for dealing with Henry at the lunch stops or at the beginning of the days ride.  This strategy involved treating Henry as if he was deaf when a general question was asked and after all of us had responded they would turn to Henry and repeat the question specifically to him.

This trait was no doubt annoying for Julia and Jo but there were other traits that Henry manifested that were downright dangerous.  He developed a tendency to whip out his mobile phone from his back pocket, after which he would drift into the middle of the road without a second glance behind him and proceed either to take a photograph or, more often than not, a video of the passing scenery.  He also had a habit of overtaking you, cutting in and sharply applying his brakes.  When we were in a line riding behind each other this had the potential, if you did not keep your wits about you, of creating a falling domino effect.  At one point in the ride, I am not sure quite when it was, Henry drew alongside me and said, “I’ve never had a serious accident on my bike”, to which I replied, “the way you ride, mate, it’s only a matter of time.”

All fed and watered we headed off on the next section of day one’s ride.  Having climbed to Porkellis we descended for about five miles which brought us to Perranwell Station.  A short sharp ascent and another descent brought us to the King Harry Ferry.  There has been ferry crossing point for travellers here on the river Fal for the past five hundred years.  The present ferry is a chain ferry which was first built in 1888.  The ferry provided a lovely, if not all too short, break, enabling our legs to recover a bit and allowing an opportunity to take in some incredibly beautiful river views.  Once off the ferry we all wished the crossing had been ten hours rather than less than ten minutes, for our legs were put to the test as soon as we disembarked.  The climb out of the river valley is not very long, about half a mile or so, but oh, my, it is steep.  Ollie shot off taking the hill in his stride, I struggled up it and, as normal, came in last, but I did manage to get up the brutish climb without getting off my bike which is more than I had done on the 2013 trip.  My plan to ride up every hill was, so far, going well, and I was pleased with myself.

 

 

Climb Every Mountain

When our little peloton rolled into Penzance, we took a different route through the town than that which we had followed two years previously.  In 2013 we had slavishly followed the route in the book, which took us through a large car park and then onto a gravel path skirting the town with great views of St Michael’s Mount.  The rain had turned the path into a quagmire and so everything got completely clogged up with crud: us, more importantly, our bikes and, more especially, the chain and gears.  Not good for man, woman or machine!  In 2015, to be on the safe side, we stuck to the main road through the town and instead had to contend with its heavy traffic and the first steep climb of many.

Now speaking of climbs, I had set myself a target for LEJOG 2015 and that was to try to make all the ascents without getting of my bike.  My father’s philosophy on hill climbing had been: “if you drop below three miles an hour you might just as well get off and walk; push your bike up the incline, as the chances are that you can walk up the hill quicker than you can if you try to ride up.” The theory being that you would not be so knackered that you would have difficulty getting to the end of a long ride as a consequence.  Mind you, the bikes he used in his day, and that I rode as a youngster, only had five gears; my present bike has three clangers on the front and nine cogs on the back making twenty-seven in all.  I reckoned, with all that lot to choose from, I ought to be able to climb up the side of a house, even though the going would inevitably be slow and it would mean that the younger team members would have to wait for the old man to catch them up. The trouble with this catch-up business, from my perspective, was the fact that I would usually arrive last and, just as I rolled to a halt, someone would say, “Ok, Mick?” and off they would go again leaving me to protest that they had had a breather and I had not.

Ollie was usually the first one up any ascent.  His philosophy was, “do it as quickly as you can and your legs won’t hurt for so long”.  Well, that’s all very well when you are twenty-eight-year-old long-legged chiselled whippet with not an ounce of fat on your frame.  In other words, nature has endued him with the ideal body for long distance cycling.  At the time of this ride I was sixty-six and, whilst not being overweight, I was carrying the kind of body mass you would expect for someone of my age who is physically fit, and I do have short legs for my height.  If Ollie is a whippet, I am more like an elderly Labrador.  No doubt when he is my age he will have to modify his philosophy unless he wants to give himself a heart attack. All that said I was determined this trip to jettison the mindset I had grown up with and try to make it up every climb no matter how long it took me.

One insight I formed about myself a long time ago is that I need goals to work towards otherwise I have a tendency to either get bored or be lazy; but experience has taught me that sometimes the goalposts seem to move of their own accord and so a certain amount of flexibility has to be built into my thinking in order to avoid frustration or a crippling sense of failure if things do not work out exactly as I hoped.  The hills of Cornwall and Devon are tricky, they are not that long but they are steep, so this goal of mine would be a real challenge but I was determined to give it a go.

As I rode along during the early part of the first day I got to thinking about other challenges I had faced in my life and how I had dealt with them.  If I had my mind set on something and lacked the oomph or, more likely, the confidence to get stuck in and thus move towards achieving my goal, I needed someone to kick me up the arse.  So, the best thing you could do for me was to tell me that I wasn’t up to it; this really got me very pissed off and I found the subsequent anger I felt was full of energy and that fuelled my eventual achievement of the goal.

I recalled that just before my “O” Levels my headmaster announced to a fourth form class, “Here is Elfred from the fifth form, with his long hair and pointed shoes, the most nauseating sight in the school!”  I reported this to Dad who went to see the Head, they both agreed that if I did not get my finger out I would fail all my exams.  With reference to the Head, one Mr Glogg (I know, he sounds like a character from Dickens and in some way, he fitted the bill), my reaction was, “I’ll show the silly old sod!” and I did by passing all but one of the exams.  I seriously wonder if I would have succeeded had it not been for the fact that I was riled up by external forces.  However, that part of my life is but a distant memory, and as I rode along I reckoned that, now I have attained the age of the “silly old sod” in question, anger induced, either from without or for that matter from within, probably wouldn’t help much.  It remained to be seen what strategy might help me attain my goal.

 

Thou Shalt Look Cool

 

“The Ten Commandments of Cycling”.

• Thou shalt always wear a helmet when riding.
• Thou shalt not get hungry
• Thou shalt not get thirsty
• Thou shalt stay warm
• Thou shalt at all times be as visible as possible.
• Thou shalt train for several months at least before a long ride.
• Thou shalt have adequate back up.
• Thou shalt carry tools that match your bike.
• Thou shalt carry a spare innertube.
• Thou shalt develop proper road skills prior to the trip.

As will be seen over the coming weeks, not all the riders on this trip kept these commandments at all times but at least they had their own priest to grant absolution when they transgressed!

After a large cooked breakfast at Penzance Youth Hostel I felt ready for almost anything. I had done this ride before and I knew what was coming which was enough to humble anyone: the 11^th Commandment is “Thou shalt respect the road!”

We checked bikes, pumped up tyres, put bikes up on the cycle racks, packed cars and headed to Land’s End.  As we arrived in the car park the heavens opened with a veritable deluge; great start and, as it happens, déjà vu, for this was almost a repeat of the start of the 2013 ride. I could imagine Dad saying, “Just my luck!” I made an executive decision to give it time to pass rather than starting the ride and getting soaking wet but, knowing my past failures in weather forecasting, I made no promises as to when, or even if, this might be.  It persisted in hammering down but just as I was about to give up and suggest that we would just have to get wet it stopped as suddenly as it started.  So, everyone got out of the support vehicles, took the bikes of their racks, put on our yellow team T shirts and headed to the legendary signpost where we joined a short queue of apprehensive cyclists to have our team photo taken.

Now I don’t know if you have been to Land’s End recently?  When I first visited it back in the 1960’s there was nothing much there apart from a car park, a wonderful seascape view and the signpost.  Nowadays to get to the signpost you have to pass through a plethora of amusements, restaurants and shops, including a branch of the ubiquitous Edinburgh Wool Mill.  As it isn’t actually the most southerly point in Great Britain perhaps it should be renamed “Naff’s End”.  The other thing that aims to catch you out is that the signpost announces how far it is to John O’ Groats (874 miles) but it is only accurate if you happen to be a crow and can fly in a straight line; actually, we would be cycling just shy of 1000 miles.

Photoshoot completed we headed off to the start line.  I couldn’t help noticing that somewhere between the signpost and the start line on the road from the car park all the yellow T shirts had mysteriously disappeared to be replaced by a host of various tops advertising all kinds of cycling kit.  What happened to team spirit?  The practical outcome of this however is I now own a large number of yellow T shirts most of which don’t fit me, and all sporting a different name on the back.  I doubt I’ll live long enough to wear them all out.  Message to self, don’t bother with team T shirts in future, they are not considered cool.

Fairly quickly the team amassed but I looked around and realised that Ollie was missing.  Several minutes passed and I was beginning to feel what I would imagine a racehorse feels as it paws the ground waiting for the start of the Epsom Derby.  After what seemed like an age he arrived and it turned out he had been rummaging around in his kit in the back of Big Cav trying to decide, given the light conditions, which lenses to wear in his cycling glasses.  I hoped that Ollie had got the lenses right, after all a young man of his age has to look cool at all times particularly on a bike.  He once made some quite cutting and scornful remarks about my sun glasses (picked up for next to nothing at Heathrow Airport), but at my age I don’t care what they look like as long as they do the job.  Once Ollie arrived, completely oblivious of other team members starting to grumble using expressions like “Faffer!” and other words and phrases beginning with “F”, we were off down the road.

I was relieved to have got going at a reasonable time despite the weather and fashion issues.  However, this sense that all was well and we were finally on our way did not last long.  After a few miles we got a call on the radio to say that Jo and Julia couldn’t find the car keys for Big Cav which they had lent to Ollie.  Ollie stopped, searched his pockets, couldn’t find them and couldn’t remember what he had done with them and so he headed of back to Land’s End at the kind of pace a straggler might attain when trying to catch up with a peloton.  Calm once again descended when the keys were found on the roof of Big Cav (well where else would you put them?) and Ollie re-joined the group as we headed into outskirts of Penzance.  Maybe the 12th commandment is, “Thou shalt strive at all times to look cool!”

Be Prepared

After a rather fitful night’s sleep I attained a hazy kind of consciousness.  My initial thoughts on waking were of the very first road trip I undertook since taking up cycling again seriously in 2005.   My mother died on Midsummer’s Day 2004 and my father gave me £1000 to buy something in memory of her.  I bought a mountain bike.  Then, in 2005 as part of the celebration of my twenty-five years as a priest, I planned to ride from Lincoln Cathedral, where I was ordained priest at Petertide 1980, back to Tadworth via all the churches I had served over the period of my ministry thus far.  By way of training for this venture I bounced around the heath close to The Vicarage virtually every day on my newly acquired steed.  On this trip Julia acted as backup, driving our people carrier, and we communicated with each other via mobile phones.  We plotted a route using a large-scale road map and met up every few miles.  Needless to say, this first trip turned out to be a steep learning curve as we were both complete novices when it came to planning and executing a long distant cycle ride.  I decided to make this ride a sponsored event in order to raise money which would be split 50/50 between the “Raise the Roof” appeal at the Good Shepherd (we needed to put a new roof on the church) and the local charity, “The Children’s Trust”.  When the ride was completed successfully and I swept into Tadworth accompanied by various members of the congregation who had joined the ride a couple of miles out, Julia (who had found the whole venture extremely stressful) swore, “Never again!”

As I started to become more conscious that first morning of the 2015 ride and the thought of the enormity of the challenge began to take hold, my mind moved on to the second cycling adventure in 2011, a ride from Mainz to Tadworth to raise money for the Centenary Lady Chapel, which we wanted to build to celebrate our first 100 years as a congregation in Tadworth.  Clearly over the months Julia’s initial reaction had abated somewhat because on this trip Julia was once again the solo support driver.  Mind you we were not much better prepared for this second venture than we had been for the first.  Four of us were riding (Ollie, Sam, Steph and me) and we had all trained physically, but when it came to logistics one might say that we were less well prepared.  We were still working from a paper map, this time a prepared route in the form of a book with maps, the snag was that it was in German and only followed the narrow contours of the Rhine, if we got off the route we were well and truly stuffed.  “Don’t worry” I confidently said to the other participants, “the cycle path runs along the river and so you can’t really get lost and anyway everyone under thirty in Germany speaks fluent English.”  Well these predictions proved to be a little over optimistic.  It’s true for the first few days of the ride the cycle path did hug the Rhine river but after that, when we got into Holland, the river split into innumerable channels and the route was not at all easy to follow.  The one saving factor in this dilemma was that Sam had an iPhone with GPS on it and that got us out of a good few scrapes.

The next ride, LEJOG 2013, was much better in terms of preparation, and we had learnt our lesson about the importance of good communication.  We cyclists were still following a written route, using Nick Mitchell’s book, “End to End Cycle Route, Land’s End to John O Groats”, and Julia once again provided backup.

As I hauled myself out of my bunk at the YMCA on day one of the 2015 ride and donned my lycra, I was thinking to myself that experience had taught me that there is a trade-off between being sensibly prepared, which on the first two trips we probably were not, and not giving in to all the perceived snags and getting so anxious that you never get on your bike and give it ago.  Suffice it to say we cut our teeth on those earlier rides and on this fifth ride (I rode London to Paris in-between LEJOG I and 2) we were better prepared.  Several members of the team had GPS on their onboard computers so that did away with our reliance on paper maps, though I must say I came to miss Ollie’s skill at riding at speed, hands off the handlebars, reading the route map, something he perfected on the 2013 LEJOG trip.  He did not get it quite right on the Rhine trip as one day he decided to cut down the weight he was carrying by ripping that day’s map out of the guide book and stuffing said pages in his back pocket.  At some point the pages made a break for freedom, landed in the Rhine river and were half way to Rotterdam before he realised they were gone.  Modesty forbids me quoting what he said when he discovered what had happened.  However, in 2015 we did have a hard copy of the route stashed in Big Cav just in case the satellites gave out at any point.  In the event, the wonders of modern technology did not let us down and a pristine copy of the route book abides on a bookshelf in my study alongside a somewhat battered and depleted version of “Rhein-Radweg, Teil3: Von Mainz nach Rotterdam”.