Training - A tour of three counties
Forest Paget, a friend from St Paul's (the church I attend), who eats huge hills for breakfast, offered to help me on a longer ride on Thursday morning. I find juggling family life, work life and this cycling malarkey quite challenging. So arranging time to get out for a good long ride can be an exercise in 4th dimensional logistics. However, on Thursday everything conspired to work in my favour. Teenagers had been put to bed late and so would be in suspended animation till early October, our dogs had been taken out for a brief relief walk, Mrs. B. was obliviously touring in the land of Nod and I had booked Thursday as a holiday from work. Four hours of no-other-commitments 'me time' whoohoo!
I crept out of bed at quarter past six. That this would be my longest ride this year was playing on my mind and the usual excuses for not getting up, queued up and traitorously presented themselves as escape routes. But... the sun was shining and the road called (well actually Forest called to make sure I wasn't chickening out).
I set out to the sound of commuters scraping the frost from their cars. The cold was a shock to the system but soon lost its bite as I cycled up past Old Sarum castle and over St Mark's hill (a high point in Salisbury) to meet with Forest, in Laverstock. Forest, ever cheery especially at far-too-early-o-clock, handed me a water bottle and we were off.
We weaved past the early morning commuters using convoluted hidden cycle paths and lanes, which are revealed only to the fully initiated cycling Illuminati, and headed up towards Salisbury hospital. We dodged occasional abandoned wheelchairs and zimmer frames and were soon out of the fumes and on country lanes into the glorious Wiltshire countryside.
The first major challenge was Coombe Hill which rises out of Coombe Bissett. Forest has an orgaised mind and has classified hills in to various groups. The some examples of these groups are:
- Snakes - winding from side to side
- Slow worms - These sap your energy with long slow climbs
- Scorpions - Nasty bitey things with a final sting in the tail.
- you get the picture....
Coombe Hill is classified as a bastard.
As we crested Coombe Hill, we were treated to spectacular panoramic views of the rolling valleys of the Western Downs. The great strain of the hill behind us we relaxed into the ride with the road rising up to meet us the wind at our backs and the sun warming our faces. I finally realised why people get up early and do this as a leisure activity. Nothing could be wrong in the world when a day was as perfect as this. Villages passed us by dripping with English springtime beauty. This land was blessed with far more than it's fair share of quaintness. Picture chattering brooks running through the daffodil festooned lawns in the gardens of thatched cottages. Somewhere, possibly in the West Midlands, there is a Dorian Grey-style village that is getting shabbier by the day just to keep these preternaturally pretty villages young and fresh.
We crossed in to Hampshire and broke the ride at Damerham where Forest has a house which he lets out for holiday lets. He had some swap-over laundry that needed to be set running. Time for a strategic banana! The banana is a miracle fruit which has everything a weary cyclist could want, sugars to pep you up, carbohydrates for long, slow release energy and vitamins and salts replacing those you burn out on the ride; not forgetting of course that they are yellow and humorously shaped.
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Bananas consumed, we were off again, bound for Dorset. Dorset is a county of dairy products and hills. Some of the hills are roaming with herds the factories of those dairy products. We rolled down to Cranbourne, only 4 miles from the Abicare Dorset office in Wimbourne. In a few months, that will be one of the stops on our BIG RIDE. I was not quite ready to think seriously about that yet, so we decided that this was far enough. Also with the time marching on, our families would be surfacing soon and demanding the continuance of normal Daddy duties.
At the farthest point of our journey we passed a small Victorian chapel building that had been restored to full health. Today it is used as an artist's studio. The artist has re-named the chapel as the "
Naughty Boy Studio".
The unusual name is derived from the film: The Life of Brian. The thinking being that when people turn up at the chapel looking for The Messiah they will now only find the artist, at which point they will say:
"He's not the messiah, he's a very..."
So now homeward via another banana stop at Damerham where we removed the now-finished laundry. The homeward journey is less clear in my memory; pain does that to a chap. There were certainly many hills and I suspect that we crossed the Alps and Himalayas at some point. Viewing the beautiful countryside was difficult due to the tears streaming from my weeping eyes and the beautiful birdsong in the villages was drowned out a little by the sound of my wailing cries. Indeed the hammering from my heart brought the locals out to see if the MOD were artillery testing. Letters were sent to the editor. "It's a disgrace, & shouldn't be allowed.."
Finally having dropped Forest back at Laverstock with a wry thank-you for helping me through the highs and lows of the ride, I crested my old nemesis the Old Sarum hill. This hill has a character all of its own. It invites you on saying, "I'm only a small hill, look I'll even make it easy for you by having this lovely castle on top for you to focus on and everything" and then just as you think you'll get there it becomes steep and saps the last vestiges of any reserve energy you have. A bit like pulling the chair from under the bottom of a person just sitting down. So I wobbled back along the last mile to my house, completely spent but very happy the task had been achieved and the end was here.
50.0 miles in 4:13 hours with an overall climb of 2480ft
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