My longest ride yet: full of self doubt and loathing

The Heart of England, 310km. April 10th.

Spending the previous couple of days in the US and coming in on the overnight flight on Friday morning before a Saturday ride may seem like less than ideal preparations for the longest ride I've ever done but the tiredness, lack of sleep and general bodyclock weirdness seemed to fade away after 12 hours in the saddle, replaced by an almost complete shutting down of all sensory perception, my whole body seemingly not connected to my mind.

But that aside, this was honestly one of the favourite rides I've ever done!

This ride is well regarded on the various chat boards as being really nice - and turning up for a 6am start at some school hall on the outskirts of Cirencester I was taken back to find around 50 other people there who seem to think that cycling just shy of 200 miles is some sort of fun. More worryingly I heard one of last years riders reporting that he finally got to the finish last year at 2am, some 20 hours of riding. That didn't bode well.

Leaving Cirencester just pre-dawn was lovely, with myself and Ed leading the pack out for the first 20km or so along quiet country lanes. I don't recall seeing a single car for the first hour - but we did see the sun breaking over the horizon and fields with deer grazing in the morning mist, just lovely. The pack, seemingly unthankful for us towing them for 20km unceremoniously dropped us up the first hill. Ed had a good enough excuse, he was doing the ride on a single geared bike and couldn't make it up the steep hill. My excuse is that I'm rubbish at climbing steep hills. Big long draggy mountains I can do, short sharp english hills I can't, never worked out why not.

This was one of those perfect cycling days, no rain forecast so you could leave all your wet weather kit in the car, the start of springtime and dry clean roads so you can change your nasty winter tyres for super smooth free rolling summer tyres, barely a breeze to disrupt your rhythm and neither too hot (though I still got sunburnt) or too cold. The route whilst going near many of the big towns in central england (Warwick, Coventry, Daventry, Birmingham) never went through any of them, a lot of effort had clearly been spent on planning the route though tiny village after tiny village. I spent almost all the ride just thinking "this is just perfect".

This perfection was rudely tweaked when at the 200km mark some bloody giant hornet (OK, wasp, bee, gnat etc, delete as appropriate) decided to kamikaze itself into my neck, stinging me before I even realised what was going on. I can think of one or two places on your body worse than the side of your neck to be stung but in terms of pain factor it was pretty much up there. It bought tears to my eyes and a few blue words into the afternoon air.

200km is my normal ride distance and this alas started to show - after around 230km I began to get really fatigued, my head sagging and full of fuzziness. At the 250km mark there was a short stretch of 20km or so on a busyish road where you needed to concentrate not just on you but also on the traffic and here I began to realise how much I was struggling with lack of alertness and concentration and wondering just how safe I was on the roads. At this point the self doubt and loathing also kicked in - not doubting that I could finish the ride but doubting / loathing my ability to do anything any longer than this one. I went through a good couple of hours of "I want to be at the finish and go home RIGHT NOW, bollocks to all this training etc etc". This seemed to fade away for the last hour when we turned off the main road onto a quiet country lane again, the finish was (metaphorically) in sight and I was now just a liability to myself and not the stream of traffic that had been coming past on the main road.

And so finally after a ride time of 13 1/2 hours, 12 1/4 of which were in the saddle, 310km were duly dispatched at an average of 25 km / hr. For around 2 hours I hated the fact that I liked cycling, but for the other 11 1/2 hours this was my favourite ride ever.