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”.