Firstly, Happy New Year. I hope last year was good and this year will be even better. My year has been amazing for reasons entirely unconnected with cycling.
I’m going to wait here until Dad gets back from Base Club.
OMFG Dad, I’m so tired just watching this hill climb.
In many ways cycling has been a secondary endeavour. I’ve still tried to squeeze it in and I’ve managed a fairly healthy racing calendar. For this I’m indebted to the support of Belle, who is amazing. It’s all well and good to say, “I’m only going to do local races”, bike racing requires time, energy and commitment. I can argue that it makes me feel better, it’s good for my mental health, I keep fit, it stops me going loco, but these are all ultimately self-serving arguments, and family comes first. I feel incredibly lucky that I have been able to race and fit in some training around family commitments, and it’s nothing to do with what I want to do, or however many sacrifices I feel like I’m making, it’s everything to do with working together to make things right and ensure that time is sacrosanct. And I’ve got it wrong at some key points this year, but generally I’ve got it right. If i had to offer a few key tips to anyone whose life is about to change enormously and wondering how they might manage to ever ride a bike again, then it’s this:
1. Family comes first
2. Ride when you can: this means don’t make plans to go out at 8am with friends, it means ride on your own in the 2 hours you’ve got in the middle of the morning or whenever the window opens
3. Make use of rollers, sometimes the window is small
4. Insist your inlaws move to a location approximately 50-70 miles away on the other side of an escarpment of hills; visit them regularly en famille: cycle there.
In line with point 4, I cycled to the inlaws at the weekend. In these enlightened times where everyone’s a cyclist and everyone has an opinion about cycling, people are less and less surprised by the strange endeavours of the long distance wheelman. I rode to Cheltenham from Bristol, a 65 mile jaunt over the old Severn Bridge and via the Forest of Dean. I dropped this into a pub conversation and it caused a murmur of disbelief. ‘You did what? CHEPSTOW? You’ve been to Wales? ANOTHER COUNTRY?’ I felt vaguely nostalgic for the days when every Monday was marked by similar conversations as non-cyclists attempted to suspend their disbelief at my heroic exploits around lanes of Kent. Maybe it was a peculiarly atavistic weekend, after all, I saw only two other cyclists in the four hours in the road and I traversed the Forest of Dean where the locals eat their young.
in the five years since moving to Bristol and 30,000 miles or so ridden I’d not made it over the bridge by bike until yesterday. Belle managed this feat some years ago. I ignored my normal Cotswold lungbuster in an attempt to squeeze in a few more miles. Riding over the bridge is fun. It opened in 1966, which isn’t all at long ago. I imagine it was heralded as a new economic dawn and anglo-welsh success story, destined to link the two shorelines in perpetuity. Instead, traffic tripled in 20 years and a new bridge was completed in 1996. I wonder how long it will be before another bridge is mooted as the solution to ever-increasing numbers of vehicles.
The Severn Estuary: a total bore
Heading into Wales for about 5 minutes
Before the bridge there was only a ferry at Aust. Some of the signage is still there and the crossing is marked by Passage Road.
Under construction; an anachronistic image of what was then the future
Under the railway bridge in Chepstow: last resting place of the Severn Princess
No Direction: Home
the times, they are a-changin’
The climb up and out of Chepstow is terrific. It heads upwards for around 4 miles or so, then the road sinuously reaches up towards the Forest of Dean. Come the high season I’d like to get fresh and take the C-Bomb up there for a bit of bike-on-hill action. There are several other tasty climbs, including one beast of a ramp up to Speech House. I enjoyed it and a 68″ was just about right, apart from one or two slightly tall ramps where I had to honk it a little bit. The run into Gloucester and Cheltenham was rapid and terminally dull, apart from a nice stretch around the lanes somewhere. I have been using the ‘breadcrumb’ mapping capacity on an old Garmin 500. It’s really simple; you map the route on bikehike or similar then upload it. As long as you keep an eye out for turns it works perfectly.
The Forest of Dean: here indeed be Dragons
My arrival was heralded by a chocolate cloud cake. It was amazing.
The chocolate cloud cake baked by Belle of Bristol. Amazing; light, perfectly formed and subtle; the C-Bomb of cakes.
The following day I rode back from Cheltenham to Bristol along my normal route; straight up and over the Cotswolds. It was cold and beautiful, but also horribly icy. By the time I’d realised just how icy, it was too late. I came round the corner near Painswick to a perfect tableau of a car, gently rocking on its side and a static sea of surface ice. Luckily a fellow cyclist had warned me near the top of the descent of ice on the road so I’d taken things extremely carefully on the way down. As soon as I saw the run-off across the road i started walking.
Something not quite right with this picture
Mercifully, no-one was hurt, although moments later the Cheltenham CCC club run came rolling down the hill and went down like nine-pins. there were a couple of dicey bits and if i wasn’t doing an A to B ride I would have turned round and headed for home. As it was, I took it steady and stuck to the main roads wherever possible. I made it back in one piece.
I had a vaguely self-satisfied feeling that comes from ratcheting up the miles over the festive period. I managed a few decent rides. However, everyone else has been out doing a passable impression of team sky, busting out back-to-back 100 milers and other insane feats, including 21,000 feet of climbing in 2 days. (J’accuse Ben Davis et aussi Tom Ilett). Oh well, no prizes for having a shedload of form in February. Unless your target for the season is the Frome and District Wheelers 10 Mile Open Time Trial. Which it isn’t.
