At 8pm on a very hot Sunday evening in August I found myself standing with my bike in a queue of thousands of riders in a sports stadium in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines just West of Paris. I felt literally shell shocked. The realisation suddenly dawned on me that I had achieved the goal I frivolously set back in December on an online thread on YACF (yet another cycling forum) where we were all deciding what we were aiming to do next year.
I had taken up cycling in June 2010 on a new hybrid bike with the intention of doing the odd 10 mile ride to improve my fitness (and therefore my asthma, I hoped) and get a few extra endorphins to help me finally get off antidepressants. Some random online research had led me first to join the CTC and then to discover a strange twilight world of cycling enthusiasts who inhabit the internet when most of them should either be asleep or at work. Riding with Bristol CTC gave me the confidence to start riding on the road rather than cycle tracks, and the YACF crowd slowly sucked me into a world where cycling was more of a lifestyle and obsession than something you sometimes do, and titanium sporks were an essential item to own.
I learned the first golden rule of cycling insanity, you can always cycle at least twice the previous greatest distance you have ever done. Trusting without question the wisdom of this rule I had set off on the Dunwich Dynamo (a 115 mile night ride from London to the Suffolk coast) having only ever done a 45 mile ride, the last 10 miles of which was very slow and painful (particularly for my rear).
Flushed with my miraculous success I became corrupted by the Audax board on the forum and decided that entering a 100km Audax after having ridden over 100 miles was less than audacious, and so entered a 200km as my first event instead. Limping home in 13.5 hours (literally, I walked many of the hills) I was satisfied that I had done my bit of madness for the year.
I rode only 2 local 100km Audaxes in what remained of 2010. But when I sat and thought about what to write in the "what are your plans for 2011" thread, I found myself writing "something longer than 200km". When someone replied "that's easy, you should ride PBP", I first of all looked up what PBP actually stood for and then found out what would be needed to qualify. It is entirely possible I was a bit drunk that evening. A few days later I had sent off entries for my 200k, 300k, 400k and 600k qualifiers. I also ordered my titanium Sabbath frame that would be my PBP bike. My hybrid was fine for day rides but no was it comfortable enough for anything over 10 hours long.
The very week 2011 started I set about 'getting some miles in my legs' with a vengeance. I had ridden maybe 1000 miles total in my life so far, almost all in the proceeding 6 months. Every chance I got I went out, Tuesdays were rides with Jane Chapman and Thursdays with the Bristol Thursday Oldtime Cyclists. I was working more than every other weekend and so my chances to do extra Audax's were few and far between. On 29th January I celebrated my 40th birthday by riding the Glastonbury 100 miler Audax from Honiton. It never got above 4C all day, but I can't think of a better way of celebrating a birthday! I managed another 150k with the Gospel Pass, and then in February rode the Wye Wednesday 200k in Kent, memorable for 2 reasons, firstly it rained heavily for the solid 12 hours I was riding, and secondly there were nasty things called flints in Kent that can go through Kevlar tyres in the wet.
By march I had my brand new Sabbath, and I rode 2 further 200k's, but they still felt like a mighty long way to me and I started to have serious doubts about whether I would be capable of going on to the next level. If anyone had suggested to me I might like to nip out and do a further 100k at the end of any of them my response would have needed to be censored.
But all too quickly May came around, and I proved that the rule of always been able to double your previous distance was true. I wasn't close to the time limit on either the Old Roads 300 or the Denmead 400. On the Seething 600 in June I was close, but only because I had 4 hours sleep in the middle. I started to realise that while I was off working my weekend shifts many of the PBP crowd were riding multiple SR series. Was it possible for a newbie with a single SR and only a year of cycling behind them to actually do it?
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