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.
