Tour of the Black Mountains (ouch!)

Where to start… umm, campsite on Friday I suppose. I’d arrived at mid-day having driven up from Cornwall in an hour less than the AA web-site said it should have taken… hopefully there weren’t any cameras watching. The campsite was ideal, close to the start and just a scruffy field with a shower hut… ideal because I didn’t feel guilty peeing in the hedge behind my tent in the middle of the night. I’ve never felt quite comfortable doing that in the middle of a beautifully manicured site populated with shiny vans and RVs…. It was only £4 a night as well. My only concern being the presence of a weathered sheep skull at the rear of my tent… evidence perhaps of a dodgy Welsh ritual perhaps…. more likely legacy of a wayward pooch. So long as it wasn’t a cyclist’s skull….
With the sun shining and tent pitched I had no excuse for not going for a spin to the top of the first climb… it was a bit further than ideal the day before a tough event and the road under the trees was wet and filthy. I felt very at home.. Of course the downside to that on return to basecamp was my previously sparkling titanium bike had been reduced to a grubby collection of tubes with the usual wet-weather collection of molluscs (i.e snails and slugs) impaled on my rear brake caliper and bottom bracket shell…. hor d’oeuvres for later then…. Not having a handy jet-wash available a quick hose-down from my ‘high pressure’ squeezy waterbottle removed said squashed things before they hardened to concrete in the sun. Here’s my bike in the ‘garage’ aka the vestibule of my tent.. handy for shelter from a passing shower.

A few other cyclists started to show up as the afternoon progressed, my ‘neighbour’ turned out to be a nice chap from Cheddar who was to prove rather bad for my health at the pub the following night…. in retrospect the pub was not a good plan… Apologies, I digress, nothing else of note happened on Friday bar the consumption of unusually large quantities of pasta and sauce around dinner time all chased down with a large scotch before retiring to my sleeping bag with book and iPod.

P.s.. here’s a pic from the road, I didn’t have a camera with me on Sunday for obvious reasons…

Saturday:

duhhh, 5.30am breakfasts are never my favourite but it was good to be up at dawn to see a clear blue sky and a wind blowing slightly less vigorously than yesterday’s howl.. Worringly though my legs were feeling more tired than is generally a good idea before a hard ride… perhaps I went a little hard yesterday afternoon. Ho hum, too late now so just had to hope that a trough of muesli and banana, with yoghurt and honey plus a large mug of strong coffee could go someway to correct the situation before the 8am start.
By 7am both me and Simon from the tent next door were getting decidedly fidgety so a warm up spin was in order before joining the growing throng of lycra-clad folk hanging around the field entrance that served as a starting ‘pen’. Legs still feeling like wood…. It was pretty quiet given the number of riders (250-ish) and sunny morning, I think most were quietly contemplating the road ahead… here’s the route profile, kind of hilly ( a bit less than 4000m of climbing apparently)…

8am and we’re off to a chorus of beeps as we roll over the transponder mats before settling into a nervously quick pace for so early on of about 35km/hr, every-one no doubt thinking of the next 18km uphill to the Gospel Pass. Normally I’d be happier spinning easily in the bunch for a slow warm-up but the road was filthy – wet with water running out of the hillsides, coated with mud and gravel and the proper countryside quota of horse and cow shit so out front seemed sensible, it was that or collect a face full of crap off someone else’s back wheel. Pretty quickly we were a bunch of just 8 at the front, following the wheel of the motorcycle escort rider. Given convention amongst roadies that the guy in front gives a hand-signal to warn following wheels of pot-holes and so on.. well, during this 18km climb we could have done with a code of recognised signals for for pot-hole, flood, gravel, mud slick, horse shit, dead rabbit etc etc…. we did our best but I still felt for the guys behind whose front wheels slid out on a particularly slick bend with expectedly bruising consequences.

Gospel pass topped out with a nasty steep little ‘nip’, muggins ‘ere being the skinny climber type was first over the top which meant a clear road ahead for a fabulous fast, open descent back down to the valley with nothing to worry about bar that peculiarly Welsh hazard of the wandering sheep or slippery cattle grid. The bends were a little more technical towards the bottom but with the motorcycle 50 metres or so in front it was easy to judge the road ahead by his red brakelights disappearing round the bends… as it happened I only nearly ended up in a hedge on one occasion with the rest of the descent being a pretty much eyeballs out kind of affair.

Back down in the valley I started to feel a little lonely. At this point, despite a brief delusion of grandeur, I didn’t really fancy fighting the next 160km alone so was quite happy to see a chap in a VOTwo.com jersey join me along with 5 or 6 other guys. A decent pace-line rapidly formed with just about everyone doing their fair-share of work on the front, my reluctant legs at this point were still complaining at the 40km/hr pace so I had no choice but to console myself with the thought that provided they got no worse then pretty soon we’d all be equal as everyone else started to suffer… and suffer they did… A long headwind pull along a section of main road followed by yet another evil climb started a process of attrition that saw me and ironman Chris (I’m sure that was his name…) up the road with three other riders yo-yo’ing off the back.

Most of the middle 100km of the route are just a blur in my memory – nasty climbs with variable gradients (but invariably steep) that defied any attempt to settle into a good rhythm. In this respect I found it harder than anything I’ve done on the continent even if the overall distance was relatively small. The scenery though was fabulous, blessed with a sunny and warm weather window in weeks of stormy weather.

I made my one and only feed-station stop at about the 110km mark if memory serves. This came at the top of yet another long climb and knowing it was past the half way point I think I said something along the lines of “at least we’ve broken the back of it…” to the girl manning the feed… she just looked at me with a wry smile… in retrospect I know why. Anyway, by now we were down to just myself and Chris doing the work with another guy hanging on but, the hills having taken their toll on his legs, unable to do work any longer. that was OK – he was nice guy and we also went back to check his welfare when he failed to emerge at the foot of a particularly steep and technical descent down to Pontsticill (I think) reservoir. He was OK, just overcooked it a little on one of the bends. This descent would have been really, really nasty in rain. Pretty soon after that it was Chis and me hammering along and thoroughly enjoying it, well, the non-uphill bits anyway. I think it was around this time that Chris glibly mentioned that with the Cherbourg Ironman just 3 weeks away he was going for a run right after the finish… I was almost in total awe of the guy but I I have triathlete friends so I couldn’t help telling him he was a proper nutcase, lol. Total respect though for enduring such self-inflicted pain (it is addictive though… right?). So while Chris was licking his lips at the thought of an evening run I was licking my lips at a sudden and intense craving for fries drenched in salt and malt vinegar………

Chris had been warned of a little ’sting in the tail’ coming up at around the 160km mark so I think from the 150km mark onwards and with rapidly tiring legs even the slightest indication that the road might be heading skywards once again triggered a real sense of fear… At 160km according to my computer the road was just nicely rolling and having long forgotten the actual profile above I was starting to feel naively optimistic…. very naively. A right turn just past 160km and the road reared up at a particularly and demoralisingly steep angle… a situation made 10x worse as we emerged from the trees by the sighting of a a number of hairpinned switchbacks high above as the road wiggled it’s way up the mountain :o( Chris was really starting to hurt on the climbs now so I gritted my teeth, popped my last gel and went on ahead, alone with my suffering in silence (dramatic eh?!).

The last km or so to top of the climb was something of a grovel, a feedstation supposedly marking the summit but I wasn’t wholly convinced and my heart sank into my shoes on rounding a bend to see the road rearing up once again a few km across the mountain plateau. Drat. It wasn’t to be however (phew), spirits rose at the sight of a road heading down the flanks of the mountain ahead, I’m not religious but I confess I offered a private prayer that this was the road I was to take…

The descent was wicked, as fast as anything I’ve come across in the Alps or Pyrenees – a clear and straight plummet down the mountain… the only glitch in the adrenalin rush being a brief moment of indecision as to whether or not it was a good idea to hit a cattle grid at 90km/hr… figuring speed was too good a thing to lose the grid was reduced to a brief, if intense, buzz. Possibly not the most sensible choice I’ve ever made but it was dry and kinda fun surprising the chap on a bike taking a more measured approach… :-)

For some reason I had it my head that the last 15km or so were pretty easy so I’d not bothered to stock up again on food and drink at the final feed-station. Big mistake. The final 15km were cruel, just endless nasty little climbs with too-short descents and not an inch of flat road. It was hot on the road so dehydration, low blood sugar and sheer fatigue from 170 fast and hard km really started to hurt me. At about 8km to go I was dealing with an unpleasant out of body experience… legs were still going round but my head was floating around somewhere above my bike with no connection between the two. With less than 3km remaining I was caught….. my hello was wasted as he passed but I was so far gone I only managed to hook onto his wheel for a few minutes before settling back into my own little semi-delirious world. It was around here that I received possibly the most bizarre warning ever when the driver of a car coming towards me pulled over to tell me “watch out there’s a man with a mattress coming”….. It didn’t make sense until I rounded a bend to the sight of a bloke staggering along under the weight of a double mattress… just the kind of thing you expect to encounter in a remote rural lane….

The sight of the tent at the finish was an impossibly wonderful sight which gave me just enough strength to pull myself together and cross the finish line in a suitably convincing manner… before collapsing on the grass inside the HQ marquee. Second on the road, less than two minutes out…

An incredible thing happened in the tent (no, no flying pigs or anything like that) .. recovering in a chair with sandwiches and a bottle of drink a couple of riders walked in… “Mark” I yelled! Talk about coincidences, my ‘gast’ was well and truly flabbered. Mark was a good buddy at university, we shared a house and many a training ride but we fell out of touch when I left the country… it had been something like 14 years since last contact and here he was.. still riding bikes and looking exactly the same as I remembered.. :-) He’d ridden the short course in about the same time I’d done the long course, felt pretty pleased about that, we were very competitive at uni :-)

My time: 188km in 6hrs 13mins, and a terrific route. Recommended if you’ve even half a mind to ride it.

So, that was it for the afternoon.. a vain attempt to remove in-grained road grime from my legs in the shower and hours spent flat out on the grass beside the tent with plenty of munchies at hand … till 6pm when it started to rain and Simon and I ‘retired’ to the Skirrid Inn just down the road for dinner. Of course by 6pm I was crying for my bed but the local Black Mountain trout was well worth suffering the droopy eyelids for.. Well, the menu said it was local trout but it couldn’t have been wild, it had that slightly fatty quality that goes with farmed fish. No matter, it was delicious, served with mountains of fries appropriately drenched in salt, vinegar and ketchup.. Kind of a ‘gourmet’ fish and chips if you like.

I really should have been in bed by 8pm but Simon wasn’t having it… drink after drink kept materialising until finally I just ’stopped’, something akin to a computer software crash… and we dragged ourselves back to camp in the now pouring rain. Not a clever recovery strategy and one I’ve been paying for ever since. Slightly worried by Simon’s fascination with the old hanging noose at the pub (a historical thing)… a tent isn’t a very secure place to spend a night… nah, he’s all right really!

So there you go, that’s it. Before I sign off though I have to tell you that I did see Chris out in his running shoes later in the afternoon, and again showing some serious stamina in the pub with his mates. Respect!