Dragon Days…. Dragon Ride ‘07

Here we are… rather than go back and ‘blog’ each day as it happened I thought I would just do a ‘memory dump’ from what was a rather excellent two-wheeled weekend. The event itself is just one day but heck, the fun started at the campsite the day before so that’s where my dump (unfortunate choice of terminology perhaps…) begins…

Day 1: Blimey, that boy can eat…
Not me, that’ll be Craig, who incidentally wishes to be recognised for his photographic contributions over the weekend, which is mostly that photo over on the right of me….. I had a lesson in eating today, Craig was by all accounts a little peckish when he rolled up to the campsite and pitched his tent. I was already suitably reclined in the sunshine with iPod and sandwich at this time and wondering if I could be bothered to go for a spin on the bike later, when he arrived along with a serious baked potato fixation… must have been bad because his tent went up in record time before we adjourned to the sea front in Porthcawl in search of a café serving the aforementioned root veg.

It was one of those odd situations I never expected to find myself in.. i.e sitting on the seafront in an uninspiring Welsh seaside resort full of pensioners… (humble apologies to both pensioners and Porthcawl residents, I’m a spoilt git having been brought up by a pretty little beach in Cornwall….). Still, the waitress was pretty, I just wish I’d had the balls to ask if she did massage and if so would she be happy to come back to my tent after the ride tomorrow… As for the food, well yep – I felt very inadequate as two full-sized baked potatoes, one with beans, one with tuna, and both complete with pasta and side salads, disappeared into my friend.. Not sure what the waitress thought when it became clear that both meals were intended for just one of us. I contented myself with a very English pot of tea, but with an appropriate cultural twist in the form of a couple of welshcakes on the side.

Back at the campsite more cyclists were arriving, one chap nearby had a very Laura Ashley inspired tent in a floral print, the kind of thing you might find in a period bathroom, or a muddy Glastonbury field. I kept my mouth shut just in case he had beer to share.
So, 3pm, sun shining (I know, Wales, in June…. shocking isn’t it!) and with nothing else to do lycra was donned, bikes assembled and heavy legs reluctantly cajoled into spinning the 6 miles or so to Bridgend for a little reconnaissance of the start area. Plenty of cyclists on the road, many of them casting the suspicious glances of the competitive cyclist in our direction rather than acknowledging my cheery wave. I have to confess to not being able to bury my competitive urges entirely either. Anyway, it was at this point that the computer on my bars decided it wasn’t going to play, it had been working fine earlier and I had a vague memory of replacing the transmitter battery in France back in May so other than swearing at it I could do nothing but put it down to Welsh gremlins. We did search out a bike shop in town but they didn’t hold anything bar a few cheapy units that I’d prefer not to spend my ££ on. Heck, it doesn’t really make much difference if I don’t have a computer tomorrow, there are times when the legs are hurting and eyelids heavy that I’d rather not know how much further I have to ride…

Back at the campsite however I couldn’t resist faffing about with unfeasibly tiny screws and an inadequate knife blade to shuffle some batteries around…. Whatever I did, it seemed to work and the system came back to life. That wasn’t all the faffing over and done with however, a quick tyre inspection showed a chunk of glass embedded in the front tread, not enough to penetrate the casing but in the interests of doing everything possible to avoid the puncture fairies the tyre was swapped for new one. Or rather the old one was removed before engaging in a wrestling match with the new one…. I’ve never come across a new tyre so tight to fit, brief thoughts about it being a 650C tyre rather than 700c passed through my rapidly darkening mind, despite the 700c printed on the side. Won the battle eventually with sore thumbs and an exhausted four-letter word vocabulary, and without having to resort to the huge metal tyre lever thingy in Craig’s toolbox. We’ll save that one for tooth pulling or some other delightful activity.

So, 7pm.. nothing left to do but sort out food for the ride tomorrow, cook a large (very large) plate of pasta and enjoy a plastic mug (left the glasses at home) of scotch. Which is exactly what we did before crawling into tents for an early night only to be ‘entertained’ until around 10.30pm by screaming 6 year olds kicking a football around the campsite… personally I’d have liked to kick them, screaming, around the campsite but without knowing how big and ‘ard the parents were beforehand I decided against that option and turned my iPod volume up instead.

Midnight… rain, heavy rain. Oh bugger.

Day 2: the Dragon…

5am… beep beep beep, ah that’ll be breakfast time then with 3hrs to go. It’s still lashing it down outside so, feeling rather smug that I bothered to bring my enormous ‘comfort camping’ tent rather than my titchy backpacking job, I brew up a big pot of coffee and settle down to enjoy half a box of muesli, pint of cow juice, banana and dried fruit in my palatial vestibule… feel sorry for Craig and invite him with his breakfast too so we can stare glumly at leaden skies and rippling puddles together. Motivation is low… it’s probably a good thing there are two of us because neither of us wants to cause the other to miss a ride by saying “sod it, I’m going back to bed”… an option that is incredibly attractive right now because along with the tent I brought my impracticably thick, double-sized Thermarest… slept better on that thing than I do at home. Judging by faces emerging from wet tents nearby we’re not the only ones wondering why we bother with this sport.

7am… still going through the motions in the rain, bikes are slung into cars not so much because we’re lazy (we are though we are, old age I reckon) but because if it’s a minging wet 200km the last thing I want to do is ride another 12km back to the campsite, in a headwind, afterwards. We parked into the nearby multistorey car park with a silly name.. (“The Rhiw” whatever that means), the damp concrete environment just adding to the prison-sentence atmosphere as we and a few other cyclists kitted up ready for a day in the rain before trundling down to the start area…. which was a bit of a ghost town. I must admit with less than an hour to go before the start I expected a lot more cyclists around and the terribly raucous PA system was only just being bolted together. As it happens being early was a VGT (Very Good Thing; I’m conditioned to pointless acronyms from my job..), allowing plenty of time for losing water ballast without queuing for ages.

The rain left off for a while but soon returned as we chatted to a number of other suckers, err, cyclists trying hard to be enthusiastic about a wet day on the bike. With the rain though came a real chill….. So leaving my bike in the care of Craig (one bike for each leg…) I hobbled on my cleats across to where a chappy had a coffee machine steaming and gushing away in the back of his van. Decided I didn’t need any more caffeine along with the subsequent pi55 stops on the road, so asked him, feeling rather silly, if he had anything decaf… a pointless request, what is the point of coffee without caffeine before a day on the bike? He didn’t but he did have hot chocolate, I declined on the grounds that I was meant to be a conscientious racing cyclist and that all that sugar and fat was not a good thing so hobbled back to Craig… who quickly set me right by calling me a silly bugger (at least he must have thought it even if he didn’t say it) and that with a 200km ride this morning a mug full of sugar and fat isn’t really going to be a problem. Hobble back to the coffee man. Buy chocolate…. hobble back again, drink chocolate… ohmigod that was good! The cookies looked awesome too but I wasn’t sure I could cope with all that yumminess in one dose….

Now, there’s a funny thing about cyclists… old acquaintances, friends etc are instantly recognisable to one another provided they are hiding behind sunnies, helmet and dressed in bright lycra… remove sunglasses and crash hat however and they’re instant strangers…. a point brought home when two chaps came over and said hello… they had bare heads and weren’t wearing glasses at that point so I didn’t recognise them, on the other hand they recognised me in full disguise from the Gran Fondo Campagnolo 2 years ago…. small world and all that. Shamefully I’m secretly pleased they’d remembered I’d been pretty quick on that ride and that they had enjoyed my write-up after….

7:50am.. at this point the PA was doing it’s best to destroy a few eardrums in the vicinity, 2000 or so riders began jostling for position in the starting lane and I decided to take a chance and get rid of the rainjacket… balancing the risk of freezing my nuts off but not having to stop against staying nice and cozy but maybe overheating & having to stop to remove it 10 miles down the road… I froze my nuts off.. but only for a bit. My computer also stopped working again. Bloody thing, it’s the bin for you when I get home.

8:05-ish am… roll over the transponder sensor mats on the start line to a chorus of beeps, turn left down a wet road wondering if the coppers really will nick us if we ignore the red lights heading out of town and slowly find my legs as the pace winds up… 30km/hr… 35km/hr… 40km/hr… all the time receiving a face-full of road spray from the tightly packed rear wheels in the bunch. Cold legs protest… hmm, bit early for this.

Beyond that it’s all a bit of a blur, it was nice fast run to Port Talbot, sharing the work in a group of about 12-15 riders and scaring the living daylights out of the motorists on the numerous roundabouts. There’s something freaky about a line of cyclists ripping at high speed across a roundabout in front of cars joining the circulation…

For the next bit I’ll paste in the route profile here so you’ll know what I’m on about when I start talking about Bwlch’s and stuff…

 

(time I think for a little geography lesson for my overseas readers… bwlch with no capitalisation is a Welsh term for mountain pass… they’re all over the place and usually covered with sheep. Bwlch on the other hand with capitalisation is both a small village near Brecon (possibly full of sheep) and a bloody big climb in the same area (that also has sheep). I’m talking about the bloody big climb in this context. Pronunciation like everything Welsh bears little resemblance whatsoever to the written word, luckily however there’s a little sound-bite here for you to enjoy)

right, back to the matter in hand.. climbing the Bwlch. For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be a ‘hard climb’ judging by the weight given to it in route descriptions and general conversation. Well it wasn’t. It’s a lovely climb though with a good surface, steady gradient of around 8-10% and only about 20km from the very bottom to the top. It also gave lovely views of…. rainclouds. Despite the damp the weathergods can’t have been in too rough a mood as the wind turbines on a neighbouring hill were stationary in the light winds, a sight to gladden my heart after weeks spent battling Cornish gales. I’d been chatting to a Welsh guy on the approach to the climb who could pronounce it properly.. I gave up trying and resolved to refer to it as ‘the big hill’ in future conversation. I always knew I was a good climber but could it really be possible that I was floating up the climb while all around me were suffering after just 40km… judging by the increasing silence broken only by laboured breathing and the imagined drip drip of sweat from furrowed brows it was true… lucky I’d packed along my quietly smug look for such occasions as I steadily increased my tempo and nonchalantly cruised to the top (it did hurt but I have a well-practised deadpan expression to hide the fact). It may be a very different story however when it comes to the second ascent of the mountain when I have 160km in my legs.

Something for the sports nutrition geeks now…I have a preference for extra protein in addition to carbs to eat when I’m on the bike. As well as adding about 25% soy protein (apparently it’s better than whey for metabolising during exercise… yep, I’m a geek too) I had a couple of protein bars taped to my top tube for a quick mid-ride recovery snack just prior to the brief rest I get when descending. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now and it seems to work for me. Not sure if it was to blame for the chorus of farting going on, possibly though it certainly seems to be a phenomenon in the high-carb content fuelled peloton. One of these bars was rapidly stuffed in my mouth as the first tight hairpin on the descent approached at a rate of knots.

The descent off the Bwlch is ace, not stunningly quick due to the light headwind and the not-too steep gradient but the surface is good and visibility of the road ahead is excellent allowing the hairpins to be taken at speed making the most of the full width of the road. Just one hairy moment as I’m passing a rider on the outside of a tight bend when he loses his line and forces me to move over, my front wheel banked right over skipping on a slick metal cateye in one brief sphincter-tightening moment before I manage to get it back together and rocket down the rest of the descent. Despite pretty much having my nose on my front tyre I’m not heavy enough to really rip it on the straights, not enough pies & donuts in my diet, but I’m still surprised when Craig appears at my shoulder once again along with a few other guys I’d passed on the climb.

We stay together, working in turns aside from a couple of wheel suckers for roughly the next 60km or so, a situation I was quite happy with during the exposed and hilly slog north towards Brecon, certainly wouldn’t want to be up here in a force 10 headwind! It was on this bit, with only a few close encounters of the sheep kind to distract from the effort, that I had my real low point. Legs suddenly and unreasonably full of lactic acid I briefly wonder what it’s all about until I notice that the other guys are also suffering to keep the pace up over the series of draggy little climbs. My low doesn’t last very long, a caffeinated gel, with all the mouth-feel of a berry-flavoured rotting jellyfish, does it’s thing and I’ve well and truly found my legs again by the time the feed-station appears at about the 100km mark not long after a nice little 85km/hr descent (more please….!). I’d planned to avoid any scrum situations at the feeds so started the day with just enough stuff in jersey pockets to keep me going all day which means that all I need is some water and a quick banana before heading off with just Craig in tow for a long, long draggy climb. It’s nice to be virtually alone again for a while, I can switch my brain off (as if it was ever ‘on’…) and just let the legs do the work. I think it was somewhere around here that my dim awareness of the world beyond sore muscles registered that fact that it hadn’t been raining and the roads were actually dry. The sun even came out shortly afterwards… I know, mad isn’t it – sun is the last thing you expect in Wales in the summer. (As a result of that my arms had a particularly weird tan the following morning… with armwarmers pulled down to my wrists and full fingered gloves the result is somewhat skin to wearing long white gloves with a t-shirt).

Eventuallly we catch a guy dressed in ‘puce’ (I’d call it pink but according to Telekom the jersey sponsor, it’s not…) who wastes no time in latching on my wheel behind Craig…. I did say hello as we passed, and I think if had returned the greeting instead of ignoring me I wouldn’t have minded him sitting back there foir a ‘free ride’ in the slipstream… as it happened however I must admit to finding it slightly irritating as he resolutely refused to share the work or at least say say so if my pace was too high for him to move to the front. Ho hum. It only lasted a few km or so as, shortly after I managed to prise a few words and short spell on the front out of him, we reformed with a few more strong riders and wound the gruppetto up to a decent pace… or rather four or five us did while the rest hung on as best as possible ;o) When I’m working hard my mind does strange things… this time it was becoming totally fixated on what looked like a beautifully polished, vintage, Record titanium seatpin holding up the backsideof the guy doing turns in front of me. It had that particularly shiny quality to it that only Campagnolo seem to be able to achieve. Maybe it was because I used to own one too that I simply couldn’t take my eyes of this guy’s arse… sounds awful doesn’t it, but it wasn’t like that at all…. Given the choice of following a shiny seatpin under a bloke’s bum or a nicely toned, lycra-wrapped female bum then there’d be no contest……

Enough of shiny things and backsides, back to the ride. I really had good legs as the 140km mark approached… surprised me that’s for sure. At the foot of the climb out off Neath there was a red light… given the number of folk looking on and not wishing to sully the image of cyclists further I stopped along with the rest of the gruppetto… but there’s always one and a silly tw*t in an orange jersey shot straight through the light and turned left onto the climb. That really annoyed me so with the extra surge of adrenalin I gave it everything up this climb. Caught the orange guy and passed him pretty quickly, and had some fun ripping past a lot of slower riders from the 135km route which had merged with the 200km route a few km back. With just 60km or so to go and with a couple of gels still in my pocket it’s bollocks to managing my effort in favour of an eyeballs out approach. It was working too until a ‘mucky’ gear change at the top of the climb saw my chain jam between crank and chainring and snap the carbon cage on my my front mech in the process.. bugger bugger bugger. Lots of swearing and and about 5 minutes later I managed to free the chain and get going.. for a bit. I hadn’t noticed the new floppy quality of my front mech so the first shift on the front dumped the chain again. More buggers roll off my tongue as I stick the chain on the large 53T ring and convince myself that the rest of the ride will be no worse than a hard fixed gear ride in Cornwall, despite the second ascent of the Bwlch.

The Bwlch wasn’t too hard on 53×23, it was embarrassing though. I’m not a show-off as such so felt obliged to apologise to a few riders as I passed, out the saddle pushing a stupidly big gear. It might have been a demoralising sight to a few, others probably thought I was just being a twit. Strangely I was more worried about what other folk would think of me more than whether or not my legs would fall off before reaching the top… They didn’t (fall off) but nearly 20km of uphill on the big ring did hurt, the descent was a relief, here I linked up with a couple more guys… we had an excellent high speed through-and-off paceline going for a while, complete with teeth gritted against the burning acid in the legs (this is fun?) until the nasty, steep little nips in the last few km took their toll on tired legs and destroyed the rhythm. I was still on the big ring and one unexpected climb in particular on the ‘dunes/downs’ with just 10km or so to go really really hurt, here I really did think my legs would fall off. They didn’t though and barring just a few annoying red lights it was an eyeballs out dash to the finish and a beeline to a nearby burger stand to satisfy my craving for something spicy and salty… a 1/2 inch thick home-made burger in a bun, with everything, and lashings of ketchup hit the spot so much better than the usual recovery protein shake.

Suddenly realise, despite the adrenalin, that I’m knackered and my face feels like a dead sea beach with it’s crusting of salt. Slowly become aware of a slight soreness of undercarriage to go with it….

Craig turned up 20 minutes or so later feeling a little the worse for wear after his stomach rebelled against a carb overload with the effort on the Bwlch so his bike has an extra crusting on it beyond the usual accumulation of road grime, sticky spilled energy drink and gel. Nice….. I just have extra ketchup on mine from my dripping burger. Yum.

Not much to say after that, the afternoon turned into an alternating cycle of eat/doze/eat/doze etc. Craig headed home, I stayed put for another night. Planned to enjoy the last of the scotch with flower tent man that evening but I faded way earlier than planned after a regular bucket of pasta and sauce so just before crawling gratefully into my sleeping bag I rolled the remainder of the bottle beneath his floral portal while he was out in search of food…..

No screaming kids in the evening this time, just the gentle pitter patter of rain as a precursor to another night of downpours. Can’t believe how lucky we’ve been with the weather during the day. Up again at 2am with hunger pangs… muesli fixes the problem briefly ’till breakfast at 5am again and a wet exit from the campsite….

So there you go… that’s just about it then, there’s nothing of note beyond that… a filthy wet drive home, the pleasant surprise of an especially chatty girl behind the till when I filled the car up on the M4 (they’re usually miserable as sin… as i would be serving rude motorists at 6am..) and a reluctant return to the office to hear all the forced tales of how great Glastonbury really was despite the incessant rain and knee deep mud……

as for times and stuff… well, 6hrs 20mins for the 200km… 6hrs 25 officially as a result of messing about with that jammed chain and a position of 36 I think of roughly 1000 riders. I could have done better I think but it’s been a couple of years since I rode over 200km, and as it’s less than a year since I was in hospital with tubes and stuff in places you don’t really want ‘em I have to admit I went home quietly pleased with myself and plotting to do better next year.