Of Geography And The Weather

I WAS ONCE told that people who live by the sea are naturally dreamers or romantics, because they have miles of uninterrupted horizon to contemplate.  It’s not the same for bike riders. 

My cycling possibilities are half of what’s available to anyone who lives inland, where potential routes radiate outwards in a full 360-degree sweep.  Certain points on the compass are non-existent for me. I can’t pedal east.  The North Sea puts paid to that. Nor can I head due south.  The contours of the coast funnel me south-west, at least until the Tay Firth and first available bridge.  As a cyclist, my dreams are cruelly curtailed.

It's April and I’ve cycled nearly 2,000 miles, but I’ve seen little new since the very first mile.  I’ve seen the same trees, bridges, churches and farms time and time again.  I’ve toiled up the same hills and swerved around the same potholes.  It’s every bit as disheartening as the wind and rain.  While my legs burn with the physical effort, my brain stagnates with boredom.  The only relief is when I drive to a new location in search of fresh challenges.  I have avoided organised sportives since last year’s Bealach na Ba debacle when I realised that the only difference between me paying £37 to enter and not paying £37 was that I got an “official” time and a “free” plastic bidon.  The route remained public and accessible to all, whether you had a number pinned to your back or not.  

So I look for my inspiration away from these organised events.  Poring over maps or Googling obscure destinations brings out the pioneer spirit.  But then I discovered something that broke my heart.

One valuable source of information about cycling routes and climbs I had discovered was a little-visited amateur website called Sportive Central. (Despite the name, it covered only routes charted by the author, not organised events).  Co-incidentally, the author was also based in Scotland.   As well as providing detailed profiles of most of the UK’s key climbs – including gradients for every individual kilometre – it also listed a promising-sounding route around Loch Tay, about a 90-minute drive from where I live.

I had decided this route – 80 miles with a couple of challenging climbs – would be a great training ride,  and pencilled it in my diary to complete late April, when the weather should be “better”.  So I logged on again to check some details, and found a page announcing the imminent closure of the site.

After a preamble about it taking up more time than anticipated, and how two colleagues who’d promised to help maintain it had lost interest, the author, “Richyboy”, got to the crux of the issue:

My mindset towards cycling has changed over the last year or so...for a long time cycling's been more of a chore than an enjoyment...I reckon it's been down to the real crappy weather we get here in Scotland...riding continually in the wind and rain can take its toll after a while...

This year I was heading out to the Alps in mid-June...and even having a goal such as that couldn't really enthuse me properly...I still couldn't force myself out to do the proper training...the wind & rain just killed my mindset.

It confirmed my own experience, but rather than feel vindicated I felt desolate.  If someone as obviously keen and serious about cycling as Richyboy – his profile showed he’d logged hundreds of miles all over Europe – had been forced to surrender, what hope for an “amateur” such as myself? 

His words were an antidote to the stirring accounts of heroism and courage I’d been reading in books about such greats as Anquetil, Hinault, Armstrong and Merckx.  Sure, they’d all had their share of appalling weather – Hinault and Merckx in particular had legendary wins in blizzard conditions to their name – but they never quit, and I would take inspiration from that.  But now here was a peer, another recreational cyclist, telling it as it was: cycling in Scotland (which would eventually record it wettest year on record) was relentlessly shit.

Richyboy continued:

I will also never ride another UK sportive in my life...for me it's too much of a lottery to have a fixed day event in the UK...you can easily spend a fortune and end up riding around a 100 mile route in terrible weather conditions...not for me anymore I'm afraid!

 The futility of forward planning.  The certainty of uncertainty.  How many dates penned in my diary had been washed out or blown away by terrible weather?  In Britain – and Scotland in particular – you cannot choose a date, even at the height of “summer”, and have any realistic expectation of decent conditions.  You can arrange to meet on a day in the middle of July and find you are battling through a torrential rainstorm. 

So Richyboy had had enough, and who could blame him?  Even the incentive of a trip to the Alps wasn’t motivation enough for him.  So what chance did I have?  I still had  three months of training ahead of me.  So far, the wind, rain and cold had been incessant, and there was no guarantee things would get any better during the rest of April, May and June.  Scotland didn’t work like that.

I wanted to reach out to Richyboy.  I wanted to meet him for a beer and swap war stories.  Maybe we could find solace, mutual support, in each other’s suffering.  His words were the saddest thing I’d seen since I'd signed up for the Etape.  Everything else I’d read or researched – even the lengths and gradients of the climbs awaiting me in France – had heightened my sense of anticipation.  But those few paragraphs on a little-known website came close to crushing me.

In an attempt to avoid the same fate as Richyboy, I resolved to find a solution to the problem rather than admit defeat to it.  There was nothing I could do about the rain other than make sure I was equipped with good waterproofs, hat and overshoes, but maybe there was a way of dealing with the wind.

In a peloton, a rider can take shelter behind others, but I didn’t have that luxury.  The only shelter I had was when riding alongside hedges, walls or in built-up areas.  So I wondered whether it would be possible to plan a route that made the most of existing barriers to the wind for most of the way.

The prevailing wind in this part of Scotland was largely south-westerly.  It had been registering gusts of over 20 mph on an almost daily basis since early December.  My regular route took me directly into the headwind for the first 22 miles, when I’d usually average a pathetic 13 mph.  The return journey, however, was usually clocked at well over 20 mph.  Though cycling against the wind was undoubtedly good for my fitness in lieu of any demanding gradients, there were occasions I arrived home sapped of all my enthusiasm as well as energy.  Those outward, grinding 22 miles, usually taking between 90 and 105 minutes, were relentlessly grim.  There were days when I couldn’t face it, and either left my bike untouched or resorted to the agony of 30 minutes on the Beast(Concept 2 rowing  machine) instead.  Surely it would be good for me mentally as well as physically if I could find a more sheltered route to use occasionally?

I laid out my Ordnance Survey map.  The featureless expanse of the North Sea taunted me.  My options were limited.  If I was to confine myself to roads and lanes with high hedges, walls, buildings or rows of trees, it would be a twisting, untidy scrawl of a route.  I would turn left at the T-junction and head through the town, where its buildings, shops and blocks of flats formed an effective windbreak.  After that, my aim was to cycle in a westerly direction, i.e. at right angles to the prevailing wind, along only roads which provided some kind of barrier. 

The laws of geography and meteorology meant it would be impossible for me to plot a circular route.  If I could trace a reasonably well sheltered route as far west as possible, then I’d be happy to return using the same roads.  But it became clear very quickly I was attempting the impossible.  All the country lanes heading west climbed gradually upwards to an exposed plateau.  Hedges and raised embankments would offer occasional stretches of shelter, but man-made barriers were limited to remote barns or farmhouses.  There were no sustained terraces of houses or high walls.

It took me an entire afternoon to map out a zig-zagging route which took me inland from the coast.  Using my local knowledge of most of the roads, plus the contours and symbols on the map, it seemed to offer varying degrees of shelter for most of its length.  However, it was barely 16 miles one way, 32 there and back.  For the sake of a bit of shelter, a route including lots of junctions, twists and turns which would frequently break up my regular rhythm, hardly seemed worth the effort.

Instead, I struck upon a far more straightforward solution.  I identified a route that would take me consistently in the direction of the prevailing wind – including a detour up Cairn O Mount if I wanted – and put nearly 60 miles in my legs.  It would be a one-way route, to the town of Stonehaven, from where I could take the train back down the coast.  But even this didn’t seem entirely satisfactory.  If I had the wind behind me the whole way, wasn’t that cheating?

In the end, I emailed Richyboy via his website.  I thought he’d find my machinations amusing.  Secretly, I hoped to learn he’d had second thoughts, and wasn’t going to admit defeat to the Scottish elements after all.

But I never got a reply and his website no longer exists.

Wish I Was There

I caught sight of myself in the full length mirror in the hall as I was leaving and was struck by a crisis of confidence.  The tall, clean-shaven figure dressed in a brown Merino polo neck, black jeans and black leather jacket staring back at me wasn’t going to be taken seriously at this interview.  I looked exactly who I was: a middle-aged dilettante with aspirations above his dole cheque.  I’d be twice as old and better dressed than anyone else, but that wasn’t going to impress a group of line managers weaned on corporate-speak and sales targets with all traces of discretion erased from their brain. I almost turned back to the bedroom.  The hall was dark and empty, apart from my bikes propped up against the wall.  A couple of discarded washers from where I’d replaced my back tyre earlier still littered the floor.  I instinctively checked the tyre, convinced my cack-handed struggle had punctured the innertube.  Fuck it, I was all dressed up, I’d been on my own staring at the same four walls all day – I picked up my car keys and left.

The experience was no less depressing than I’d feared.  There were eight of us being interviewed for jobs in Dundee, Forfar and Perth as well as Arbroath.  The posts were all the same: part time sales advisors for Thomson Travel. My rivals were all females.  A group of Thomson’s managers had been bussed in from the other branches to monitor us as we took part in a “group exercise” before the one-to-one interviews.  The three females in my group were very garrulous without actually saying anything of note.  When I offered a point of clarification, I was met with looks of disdain.  My experiences shepherding adventure tourists around Egypt or US High School students around Europe could not compete with Emma's success selling optional extras as a holiday rep for Club 18-30. All this was noted on their clipboards by the hovering managers.

Then we were each assigned to a different manager for our interviews.  This system struck me as remarkably flawed: even if they were going to ask us the same questions from the same checklist, it would ultimately amount to whether our respective interviewers argued our cases strongly enough when they sat around to compare notes afterwards.  It also struck me as entirely arbitrary that my two rivals for the Arbroath job were to be interviewed by the manager and deputy from the Arbroath branch, while I was to be interviewed by the deputy manager from the Dundee branch.  None of it made any logical sense and yet all of it was obviously straight from the Thomsons corporate HR manual.

The actual interview consisted of Anne reading me a series of questions from the printed sheet of paper in front of her to which I was expected to answer with phrases like “I consider myself a good team player” and “my main goal would be to ensure customer satisfaction.”  I also included a few abstract references to “personal and professional achievements” and “career goals” for good measure.  At the end of it, I had to play the part of Thomsons sales advisor to Anne’s customer.  My previously much-touted virtue of being “a good listener” was put to the test here, but I think I passed with flying colours, successfully selling Anne a two-week holiday to Egypt complete with insurance and the optional extra of a late checkout.

When I left the interview, I was already going through the first stage of a cycle I had become increasingly familiar with.  In this first stage, I was content I at least hadn’t disgraced myself at the interview. (In some instances, I’ve even felt as if I’ve learned something from the experience, though I honestly couldn’t say that in this particular case). Over the next few days, I would go through the rest of the cycle:

• I don’t actually want the job anyway.  It’s menial, target-driven and poorly-paid.  Plus I’ll have to deal with members of the public.
• Actually, if I was offered it, I’d probably take it.  I’d earn more (in this case just about) than on the dole, and it might do my self-esteem some good to get out and interact with other people.
• The more I think about it, I’m a certainty.  Even if I was twice the age of the other candidates(and some of the managers), how could they fail to have been impressed by my worldly-wise charm and abundant life experience?

The final stage is the crushing disappointment and emptiness I feel when the rejection email finally pings into my inbox.