A visit to see Tom For the last 3 days the Met Office have been forecasting for today to be sunny and at the worst dry. At 11 pm last night I checked the forecast and other than the possibility of light showers late on in the afternoon it still looked good.

This morning as I opened up the curtains it was bright but there were dark grey clouds on the horizon. A quick check of the forecast and now it was going to be heavy rain from nine o'clock onwards. Great. How can the Met Office not predict the weather 9 hours in advance. Anyway I quickly packed my raincape and headed off.

I'd been planning this trip for a couple of weeks but hadn't been able to fit it in. My plan was to visit the cobbles at Roche Abbey and then head onto Harworth before following pretty much the same route home. As I got to the edge of Clowne it started to absolutely pour down so I quickly stopped put on my rain cape and carried on. Due to the recent deluges we've had the roads quickly became torrents if water and due to my lack of mudguards I started to get very wet!

The roads are in pretty shocking condition and with avoiding pot holes and puddles I must have added a couple of kilometres to my final distance!

The route was undulating until I got to Dinnington where it flattened out pretty much all the way to Harworth. At Harworth my first stop was at the cemetery to visit the grave of Tom Simpson.

The cemetery is in a quiet spot of the village and with the wind and the rain it felt quite a lonely place. Tom's headstone is a fitting tribute to the man.

From there I headed, after getting lost, to the Sports and Social club. Inside is a large glass cabinet that contains one of Tom's bikes, several jerseys and lots of newspaper clippings of his successes.

Unfortunately I was that wet and hungry when I got there I probably didn't spend as much time looking at everything as I would have liked.

The journey back home was equally wet and was alright until about 20 kilometres to go when my back and hip started to ache.

All in all it was a good ride though I'm desperately hoping for some drier, sunnier weather.

http://www.brytonsport.com/mapTrackView/2?id=28580&sms_ss=email&at_xt=4d6a7cd...

It's only recently that I've discovered that my Grandad was a keen amateur cyclist. Since taking up cycling over the last couple of years whenever I've mentioned anything about cycling to my Dad or other relatives they have replied back to me "You're just like your Grandad". Since then I have heard stories from my Dad and from other relatives about how he had a Claud Butler bike, that he belonged to the local cycling club and would take part in time trials.

He worked in HM Naval Base Portsmouth and as a reserved occupation it meant that during the second world war he wasn't enlisted into any of the Armed services.He was a member of the Home Guard and was part of a detachment that operated Anti Aircraft Rocket Projectors on Southsea common. During the war my Grandma was evacuated to Devon and so my Grandad would cycle from Portsmouth to Bideford to see her. On modern roads that's a distance of 170 miles so on wartime roads it may have been more if there were diversions in place. I can imagine the first time he rode that route it must have provided a real test of his map reading skills. 

I decided to do a quick google search for his name but it wasn't until I used the search term "FB Long" that I finally found something. Thanks to the Southern District of Cycling Time Trials there are archived results of time trials dating back to 1930. 

I then did an advanced search of their site and got the following results.

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=any&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vf=all&vm=p&fl=0&fr=yfp-t-702&p=fb+long&vs=southdc.org.uk

Not only did it show that my Grandad competed in time trials it showed he was pretty good at them too. His times are much faster than anything I can muster and achieving 205 miles in a 12 hour time trial is a pretty impressive feat of endurance.

I emailed CTT to ask if they had any other archive material available and Steve Brown very kindly replied with a couple of scanned documents and a promise to have a look through his loft for anything else.

Below is a scan of the results sheet from the 1940 Gosport CC 50 where F Long finished 3rd in the handicap race. 

Unfortunately my Grandad died in 2004 and so I never had the chance to ask him about his cycling. The Grandad I remember played Golf, liked a lunchtime pint of bitter, had a penchant for steak and kidney pies and would read Teletext from page 100 to 999 on a daily basis!

 

 

Yesterday I got very wet. I had planned all week to go out for a long ride as part of my preparations for the Flanders sportive. The weather forecast hadn't looked too promising all week and so I had resigned myself to the fact it was going to be a wet ride. Originally I had planned to head to Roche Abbey and have a bit of a practice on the cobbles but I decided that riding the 25 miles return leg into what would be a headwind wasn't ideal and so decided I would do 3 laps of a 17 mile loop to get me up to my aim of riding 50 miles. 

I got myself togged up and headed out. the first thing that hit me was the wind. Although not as strong or gusty as last week, when I abandoned my ride after a quarter of a mile, it was still quite gusty. I headed along the A61, the volume of traffic and the gusty wind meant I felt slightly vunerable and so decided again to change my route. 

I decided to head out into Nottinghamshire to the edge of Clumber park before heading back. With the southerly wind it meant that I spent a lot of time cycling with crosswinds. The worst thing about these is you end up leaning into them but you end up having to suddenly straighten up when the wind suddenly stops. 

The day before I'd bought some Power Bar Ride bars and also some Power Bar caffeinated gels with the idea of trying out a refuelling strategy for Flanders. The bars seemed to give me a bit of an energy boost but for whatever reason I didn't seem to get anything from the gels. The other problem I had with the gels is that I ended up having to stop to take them.

The last 10 miles of the ride were probably the worst as it started to absolutely lash it down and I also had to contend with a fairly steep desent that was wet, muddy and gravelly. I don't think I've ever gripped the brakes so hard and even though I was creeping down the hill I still managed to get the back wheel slip on one of the bends.

All in all I did 75km which considering the conditions wasn't bad I suppose. I think it's going to be a struggle to get a 150km ride in before the sportive itself. I'm wondering whether the 75km ride might be more manageable. The least enjoyable part of the ride was washing the bike once I'd got home.

Interesting things seen on the ride were a Hell's Angels chapterhouse and a sign at the side of the road for a mole catcher with a "No mole No fee" headline. The only other cyclists I saw were MTBers which was a bit of a poor showing I thought.

 

 

This video clip was posted by sprintingforsigns last week on his blog and I was surprised to see myself appear on the video. I've since looked through the photos I took and I have a nice one of the Mavic car as it drives past.

 

 

 

The first race of the season didn't go quite as I had planned. I'd agreed to travel down to the race with a couple of club mates who hadn't raced before. Due to logistical problems they ended up being 40 minutes late to pick me up, no roof rack ready so I had to dismantle my bike and stick in the boot of his car. A navigational error later we eventually pulled up into the car park twenty minutes before the race was due to start. After rapid registration and reassembly of my bike, my warm up consisted of riding to the start and only just about managing to get into the starting box with a couple of minutes to spare. According to the race announcer there were 143 riders due to start the race.

Before too loo long the whistle blew and we were off. Having seen very little of the course before hand the first lap was a learning experience. The course was one of two halves. The first half being mainly uphill with a gravel section and then a longer drag upto the singletrack section. Once through the singletrack it was then back onto the grass for a snaking flat and downhill route back to the finishing line.

Unfortunately the lack of warmup meant that it took a couple of laps to get going by which time I was towards the back of the field and I pretty much stayed there. Towards the end I closed up on a group of riders but my attempts to get past them were foiled when I had to pull over to let some of the leaders past in the singletrack!

I finished 135th although I think 4 riders did not finish. Although I was a little disappoined it was at least an improvement on last season where I failed to finish my first race.

The next race is in a fortnights time and this time I shall be travelling down by myself and with better preparation hopefully I can pull myself further up the field.

Cue two weeks of intensive training!

 

This year I shall be mainly using this blog to plot my progress in what will be my first full year of competing taking part in Cyclo Cross races organised by the Notts & Derby Cyclo-cross League.

Last year I entered a handful of races, of which the first I didn't finish and all bar my last race of the season I finished as the Lanterne Rouge. Or last in non-cycling parlance.

This year my aim is to improve my fitness and skill levels (especially on the singletrack) and with this improvement it will eventually reflect itself in my results.

For this season I have borrowed a Pinnacle Expede 0.0 from my club. It's lighter than my own bike and is also more aggressively geared so should help. Unfortunately after taking it out for a test ride the night before the first race of the season I discovered it was dropping the chain whenever the cranks were back pedalled and I didn't have the time to sort it out so the first race of the season would be ridden on my Revolution Cross.