Writing about cyclists recently reminded me of a bike ride I did a few years ago.<\/p>\n
At the squash club I used to play at, a group of them were serious cyclists and every year they did a run to Skegness (about 80 miles). Some of them were serious racers, and one of them was able to do the journey in around 2\u00bd hours.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’d been doing a bit of training with them on my mountain bike and was going along. The night before at the club, they said “you know how to get there, don’t you?” I used to go there every year when I was a kid and knew the route – one of them – so I said “of course”.<\/p>\n
Next morning I turned up to the meet and had a small rucksack with me. It had bottles of Lucozade and Mars Bars. They said “you can’t ride all the way with that weight on your back. Throw it in the van and you can get stuff out when we stop at different points”. Fair enough, so off we go.<\/p>\n
We averaged 23mph between West Bridgford and Grantham. I thought “I’m not going to keep this up for 80 miles”, and when we got to Grantham Hill (not sure if it is really called that, but it’s a hill and it’s in Grantham), I thought “screw this” and got off to walk up. I said to them “don’t worry, I’ll see you later when you stop”.<\/p>\n
So, I get back on and start riding. I went via the route I used to go by when my family holidays were spent there every summer. I expected to catch up with them, but there wasn’t a peep.<\/p>\n
At about 30 miles I checked my phone and there were missed calls. Signal is erratic out that way, but I got in contact with the support van and they had been driving back and forth trying to find me. It turned out that my route and theirs weren’t quite the same – mine was the more obvious A52 via Boston, whereas theirs was the cyclists’ A153 route via Sleaford.<\/p>\n
I had no money on me to buy anything with sugar in it, and only my water bottle – which I kept filling up on garage forecourts. It was quite a warm day (but with a breeze), and at one point out around 60 miles I lay down in a field of cabbages and slept for an hour. Every time a farm truck filled with onions went by my stomach started rumbling. I was looking for trees with something to eat on them. I was starving.<\/p>\n
I made it in the end. When I got hold of that rucksack I drank four bottles of Lucozade and ate six Mars Bars in one go.<\/p>\n
So the moral is: make sure that when you give instructions you avoid ambiguity!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Writing about cyclists recently reminded me of a bike ride I did a few years ago. At the squash club I used to play at, a group of them were serious cyclists and every year they did a run to Skegness (about 80 miles). Some of them were serious racers, and one of them was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t