damerell

This 100km Audax was a bit of a funny one, being largely through London. The minimum speed is very low (10kph), perhaps because of the frequent dismounts and walking bits, but it is also pretty much flat. In much of the London stop-start bits I felt rather I should have been on the Brompton.

This also meant the routesheet was a whopping four A4 pages - much larger than normal, given the lack of "L at X and SO for 15 km" instructions, and particularly alarming for me since I normally have a stoker to read me all that stuff. Fortunately for most of the ride I was tagging along behind other people, but next time I must work out a better arrangement.

My sleep cycle was completely zapped, as usual, so I spent the night before playing Simutrans, gave one of those "fix up my rustheap as a favour" bikes back to the friend who owns it, gathered a pile of food and hogged it, gathered a pile of food and stowed it, and rolled down to the start - which, for a nice change, was five minutes away.

I was pleasantly surprised to run into two friends of mine (julietk and uon) at the start, and rode along with them and two more friends of theirs. They started quick and feisty - in my view Audax is more like a pie-eating contest than a race, to be taken slow and steady - but I was OK, and given the amount of walking later, it didn't hurt to get some quick kilometres in.

We saw very little of the Hounslow Wheelers after the 42km control, but there were about half a dozen other people making much the same progress as me who we'd end up riding with off and on.

Nice start up the river but in London proper there was an awful lot of hammering over cobbles; Juliet's rear rack broke, as pot-metal racks tend to. There was a lot of good scenery, though, to be fair to the name of the ride. The only manned control was just before the Greenwich foot tunnel - I've been meaning for some time to have a look at that, and the route obligingly went through it. Of course the lift was out on the upwards side, so we score .001 AAA points...

Naturally this meant a climb up to the Observatory - Juliet, on fixed, seemed not to appreciate gratuitous gear changing just under her nose, for some reason. The routesheet is quite right to send you up to the viewpoint and back again on the same road, but then (alas) you descend and go into the desolate wasteland around the Dome (itself not all that easy on the eye).

This meant a lot of gravel and sand and whatnot - not for the first time, I was sorry I didn't have the fat tyres of the hypothetical fixed - and narrow paths. From here the route is pretty much NCN4 / the Thames Path up to the Belfast, and hence constant 30 second runs between bits full of pedestrians. Somewhere around here Juliet and Doop disappeared off home for tea and cakes - they'd finish later.

There was a bit more ped-laden noodling around after the Belfast, but after that it opened up a bit, past the Eye, over Westminster Bridge, wave to the protestors in Parliament Square, walk past the bit where you can't cycle in case of attack by the Al-Queda Cycle Club or some such nonsense, and then up the Embankment.

At this point I was still following the two friends-of-friends, but I was pretty sure they'd missed a turning - of course this always happens when you're hammering away at high speed. I caught up with the rearmost of the pair, failed to convince him, and stopped; this was probably for the best because when I did I realised I was slightly empty and hogged some malt loaf before checking the A-Z and turning back - only for a few hundred yards.

This left me solo through Battersea Park and Richmond Park (fortunately the duathlon was finished by then so I could use the park roads) but at Teddington Lock I spotted a familiar jersey ahead so I put on a bit of a burst and caught up three other riders, who I rode with past Hampton Court Palace and through Bushy Park to the finish.

Finished at about 1650 - given that we weren't away until about 0945, that's about 14kph, which is pretty dismal until you remember all the walking bits. However, somewhere along the way my cyclecomputer flipped over to 20,000 miles, which I'm quite pleased with. I refused the post-ride tea and biscuits in favour of going straight home to shower and change, and declined enticement to the Pembury in London which turned out to be a good plan because suddenly the sleep caught
up with me. Z.

Bit bothered about sore knees - I was more sore after this 100km than I have been after 200km on the tandem, which has a nominally quite similar riding position, and I wouldn't normally expect soreness in the knees at all. I suspect the saddle on that bike has changed height - it's done the lion's share of those twenty thousand miles.

I did look at the fixed conversion, which is a rather nice looking old roadster scrounged out of a friend's garage. I hadn't really thought enough about the oddity of a twenty-year-old bike with 26" wheels - sure enough (of course) 26 x 1 3/8 is the old roadster size, ISO 590. At this point a sensible person would have given up.

I'm planning to rebuild both wheels (track hub, SON, and besides it's got steel rims) anyway, but 590 is not a size in which you can get decent quality tyres and it's neatly positioned between 700C and 26" MTB such that neither readily available size will be at all a good fit - 700C would never go in the frame, and 26" MTB would look daft (which I can live with), need the brakes replaced with super long reach ones (which might be tolerable) and drop the bottom bracket a fair way (which I can't live with on fixed).

So I find myself joining the 650B resurgence with an order to Gilles Berthoud in Paris. Oh well... this is going to be an expensive free bike.